I don't know much about musical theory, nor am I a musically inclined person. However, I do love to listen to video game soundtracks. They can be a powerful listening experiences in their own right, or be as evocative as the scores composed for film. Each of these posts will feature a sampling of music tracks from a single game title, or series/franchise in some rare cases. A complete list of these can be found on the Video Game Music page.
Composers: P. T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybyłowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan
Singers: Aligns & Rubicones, REL & Artemis Delta, Jason Charles Miller, Alexei Brayko,
Release Date: February 15, 2022
A freelance mercenary known as "V" (Vincent / Valerie) operates within the independent megacity and city-state known as "Night City". They are reluctantly imbued with a cybernetic "bio-chip" during a job that contains a digital version of the legendary rockstar and terrorist,
Johnny Silverhand. The two are forced to work together when Johnny's consciousness begins to overwrite V's own. To survive they need to find a way to separate - something that could kill one or both of them.
Multiple licensed music artists from around the world contributed to Night City's fictional radio stations, with the real-life band Refused providing music for the fictitious band, Samurai. The songs vary widely in style but all touch on Night City's socioeconomic situation, violence, rebellion, death and suicide. The music was purposfully varied to reflect the different regions and groups within Night City. Some parts are "super dirty, super heavy" to make the player feel like "the perfect killing machine", while others are "beautiful and ambient" to reflect the nature of the city as both a "pretty and scary" place to be. In an interview the composers stated that they wanted to give 80s music a 90s flair, which they achieved by using analog synths for almost all of the music so that it would be electronic but "with a warmth to it". The soundtrack has been described variously by the team as "noisy, aggressive, industrial" and "psychedelic, edgy, and uplifting".
Friday Night Fire Fight | (Radio Song)
V | (Protagonist Theme)
Antagonistic | (Radio Music)
Night City | (Radio Song)
Reaktion | (Radio Song)
Resist & Disorder | (Radio Song)
"Hard to decide which of your friends get to die, isn't it?" - Johnny Silverhand
It is refreshing to get a gardening simulator that isn't about growing and selling vegetable crops. Instead the player cultivates a community garden full of decorative plants and lawn ornaments. The locals will provide a few seeds and tools to get the player started, but to earn money you will need to create flower bouquets from clipped flowers to sell in the marketplace via an honor system display. There are four seasons, but these are mostly cosmetic and only impact the availability of certain items in the shop.
Flower sculptures are a goal for the player to work towards. In town there are pre-made wooden frames over which flowers are placed. Each one requires a set amount of a specific plant variety.
Each species of plant is available for purchase in the marketplace right away, but only as the 'base' variety. Special color variants are obtained randomly from seeds produced by mature plants in the garden. There is also an assortment of gnomes, trellises, planters, wind chimes, benches, and ponds to decorate the yard with. These can be rotated, stacked, and clipped into other objects. However, there is a limit to the number of plants and decorations you can have. After planting the greenhouse I had reached about 80% of the plant cap, so I needed to lean heavily on decor to fill out the remaining bare patches of the yard. It was disheartening, but I can accept that this is likley due to hardware limitations. And it isn't like these plants are static; when clipped the leaves grow back, they climb rocks and buildings, and they grow or wither in front of your eyes.
It would've been nice to have had animals like hummingbirds or butterflies show up when certain plants are grown. Instead the most you get is fish by placing a statue near a stream. There are so many improvements and additional decorative plants or elements such as xeriscaping that could be added in the future or in a sequel. I would be excited for anything new from this humble little game.
NPCs only appear as 2D images next to a dialogue box, but are all excellently designed and very likable. What little story is present was surprisingly touching.
The Mighty Nein is an adult animated series based on campaign 2 of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. Critical Role is a group of professional voice actors that get together to play D&D 5th edition. The cast own the intellectual property and have already produced a number of licensed works based on the show. A single Critical Role campaign will consist of a series of story arcs, played over multiple sessions. Between or sometimes within the major story arcs, the characters rest, resupply, or go on side quests. While each campaign centers on a different party of adventurers, the campaigns are all set on the various continents of Exandria, a world of Matt Mercer's creation.
Campaign 2 ran from January 2018 to June 2021; totaling 141 episodes with an average runtime of 3 to 4 hours per episode. It follows the adventures of the Mighty Nein party and is set primarily on the continent of Wildemount roughly 20 years after the Legend of Vox Machina. The Critical Role cast reprise their characters for the show, which consists of 8 (50 minute long) episodes.
Spoiler Warning: I am going to give a synopsis of each episode and my opinions at the very end.
The story is a simple black-and-white tale of a righteous prince using his magical ring to defeat an evil overlord. The exiled prince Alain will lead his Liberation Army in a campaign across the the five realms of Fevrith, freeing captured towns to gain access to shops, taverns, and unit upgrades. The massive cast of characters all have distinct personalities and managed to stand apart visually from one another. There are a number of slice-of-life support conversations that open up by having units fight together on the battlefield or dine together at a tavern. These character stories were compelling enough, but none stood out as particularly surprising or unexpected. The ones I remember the best are Amalia's (demonic?) possession and Auch's desire for approval from his late mother. At various points you can choose to execute or recruit a former enemy, but as far as I can tell there is no reason not to recruit every single time, as there are no negative consequences for it and execution will lock-out side quests. I did like that every member of the Liberation Army felt like they had a good reason for being there, be it ties to the royal family or for personal gain.
There is a great diversity of races, consisting of humans, elves, winged celestials, and various beast races.
Units move in real-time across an overworld map, capturing command posts and dealing with concealed enemy units and choke points. Siege weapons and traps may also be employed. When two units meet it will initiate a battle that plays out automatically in real-time without input from the player. The skirmish lasts until one side is depleted of people or until points used to perform actions are exhausted on both sides. Before deployment, teams (units) of up to five characters are arranged in a 2x3 grid. The order they will attack in is determined by their 'initiative' value. Arrangement also matters. Some classes are better at guarding (themselves and other units) and are best positioned in front of or next to long range classes. Items that increase speed, damage, and defense can also be used in advance.
Unicorn Overlord is a decent strategy game that almost anyone of any skill level can get into. Its gameplay mechanics are easy to grasp and just complex enough to keep them engaging.
The Monster Hunter franchise alternates between mainline releases with big budgets and more experimental spin-off titles such as Rise. And a lot has changed. Farming has been meshed with the Argosy (trading ship), Tailraider Safaris are now the Mewcenaries, and the lizard mounts have been replaced by a palamute (dog) that the player can customize and ride. This makes getting around Rise's surprisingly vertical maps a breeze. The downside is that there isn't much of a reason to move vertically because most of the fights happen at ground level. A new 'wirebug' mechanic can be used to zip through the air and to take direct control of weakened monsters in order to puppet them into fights with other monsters. For some reason players now start every mission with a chunk of their health and stamina bar locked out. The only way to access this missing section is to collect glowing spirit-birds in the environment, which isn't so bad at first but becomes tedious over time, especially as the monsters get tougher.
Rise made me miss the boisterous energy around meals big enough to feed a family of eight. The Hunter and their dog now only eat dango; a sweet, usually vegetarian food. I hope they don't get diabetes.
In many ways Rise feels like a regression from World due to the large number of cut features: the sling, mantles, stealth bushes, destructible environments, scoutflies, and investigations are gone. Different aggro ranges, idle animations, and turf wars for the monsters have either been reduced or are gone completely. Breaking monster parts no longer seems to impact their movement or ability to inflict status ailments, and a lot of returning monsters have been given their old move-sets back. Players that got their start with World are sure to be shocked by how aggressive the original barroth was. The hit boxes are also some of the worst I have encountered yet in a Monster Hunter title. It doesn't matter how far out of reach I am or even if I am up high on a cliff, an invisible force field is sure to find me and I am not alone in this: video 1 and video 2.
The Switch's hardware limitations restrict how luxuriant the maps can be, so none of them are as vivid or alive as World. Two maps from the third game (Tri) - the Sandy Plains and the Flooded Forest - were recreated in Rise's style with their battle-zones intact and the loading screens removed. The results are quite good and didn't feel gimmicky at all. Players still engage with the staple gameplay loop of hunting massive monsters to craft better gear in order to take down even more powerful animals, but it's easier than before. Part breaks and shiny drops are more plentiful, and gear requires fewer resources to craft. It's very friendly to new players and the lower part costs allow for more experimentation with different weapons, unlike in the mainline games where you kinda needed to pick your 'main' early and stick with it because the cost of switching later was detrimentally high.
The weapon designs in general are much better than Worlds which used a "slap-on" design - the same bone or metal weapon base would have skin or feathers tacked on. Rise by comparison has fewer weapon upgrades but greater stat increases and visual variety. There is also better animal variety than World; wyverns still dominate in numbers, but there is an almost equal number of leviathans and fanged beasts, and at least one invertebrate. I also finally got the chance to fight a chameleos (an old monster that hasn't had many appearances) and learned to use the hunting horn - one of the series least played weapons - thanks to Rise re-working the weapon to be more user friendly. I had been curious about this weapon since my first Monster Hunter game, but never got into it due to the learning curve.
The Monster Hunter series has always had a tradition of setting the flagship monster up as a rival to the Hunter by having them make a surprise appearance in quests or disrupting the ecosystem and village life in some tangible way, but magnamalo just kinda appears without much fanfare. I mistakenly completed the 'hub quests' (multiplayer) first, instead of the 'village quests' (single player / low rank), so my first time even hearing about magnamalo was in the quest to defeat him. Had I completed the village quests first there still wouldn't have been any build-up, rivalry, or special gameplay interactions for this monster. At most he gets mentioned twice by NPCs and appears once in a cut-scene, so the mystery behind the hordes of monsters rampaging through the village ends up overshadowing him.
I also miss when the flagship monster could just be a regular animal that fit ecologically into the game, like lagiacrus and nargacuga. I can tell you what habitats they prefer, what their roles in the environment are, what their daily habits are, and how they function on a physiological level, but I can't do that with magnamalo. From in-game text I know that his "digestive gases" are expelled through vents on his arms, back, face, and rear. But I don't get how he manages to throw this fart gas like a projectile, or why it is explosive in nature and purple in color (the same as poison). Visually magnamalo has the presence of an Elder Dragon - essentially a force of nature with special powers. In battle he can leap straight across the arena 2 or 3 times in a row, moves in erratic ways, has gigantic hit boxes, and uses multiple area of effect attacks in addition to having a special ailment (hellfire; aka blastblight) unique only to him. But he somehow isn't classified as an elder dragon. Someone just as confused as me actually made a silly cartoon that summarizes my feelings on magnamalo pretty well.
They left out mythology-based monsters like kirin but included rajang, which is powered up by kirin. Odogaron was also left out (presumably for the lack of suitable environments) in favor of izuchi, an entirely new monster based on the same yōkai (Kamaitachi) as Odogaron. One of the NPCs is also sitting on a young (stunted?) tetsucabra, but the Hunter never actually gets to fight one in-game. The opening cutscene of a 'wind serpent' in the clouds I thought for sure was going to be an amatsu, but nope. The monster selection isn't bad by any means, just a bit odd.
The main story is also a bit weird. For some reason the end-game boss monster can "resonate" with two twins in the village - essentially possessing them to use as mouthpieces. The story never actually does anything with this or bothers to explain it properly, so it is hard to quantify exactly what "resonance" can do and what its limits are. The twins only really talk to each other when in their possessed state and not to anyone else, so the telepathy could be accidental. By the end of the game I still had no idea why "resonance" effected the twins and no one else, or what its purpose was. Is it unique to wyverians or can it effect humans as well? Why were none of the other Wyverians in the village effected? Why were the twins only possessed and not enraged like the monster hordes? In the context of the Monster Hunter universe it is highly unusual to include something so supernatural. It's the sort of thing that wouldn't be out of place in a more anime type game like God Eater 3, which actually featured monster resonance quite heavily in its plot.
Bishaten was my favorite new monster. I enjoyed the uniqueness of his fruit mechanic and the idea that a simian-type monster would be smart enough to use basic tools/items (such as flashpods) against the Hunter.
Rise is ultimately fine for what it is, especially as a side entry and I am glad the development team has a place where they can experiment with new stuff that may or may not make its way into the mainline games. Rampages, which are essentially tower defense, were a flop and likley won't return. Likewise the telepathy, vegetarian diets, and faster pace of fights just didn't feel like a Monster Hunter game to me. I have heard that the Sunbreak expansion corrects many of the base game's shortcomings, but I don't own it and I have no desire to. I have gotten my fill of Rise and am looking forward to what the next entry - Wilds, has to offer.
