It’s another GLORIOUS Tuesday, folks, and we’re here talking new games. What are you gonna pick up? What are you excited to try out? Is your dog depressed? Have you eaten swordfish recently? What goes into this bucket? Does my butt look big? How old is Martin Short? Did the dinosaurs like Jazz? Did God ever answer Margaret? Gin and juice, or just gin? Pop-Tarts; friend or foe? Can I borrow a feeling?

 

Top Releases:

A Total War Saga: Troy (PC – Epic Games Store) – Releases Aug. 13^th

Creative Assembly have been making Total War games for twenty years, spanning all kinds of historical eras and locations (and even some fantasy worlds), now they are setting their sights on the Trojan War between Troy and Mycenaean. I’m not really sure why they title of this game is a bit different than usual (i.e. Total War: Atilla, Total War: Rome, Total War: Three Kingdoms, etc.), as this title seems to incorporate everything you know and love in the series, namely epic battles with huge armies as well as some good old fashioned real-time city management stuff. As an added bonus for early adopters, the game will be 100% on launch day, what a great deal!! The catch, though, (for some at least) is that you can only get the game through the Epic Games Store *cue Price is Right horn*. Yeah, I know, there’s still some baggage with Epic in regards to how people feel about a PC game being “exclusive” to the maybe right/maybe wrong privacy concerns, to you name it, someone will have something negative to say about the Epic Games Store. It’s such a sticking point that even the team at Creative Assembly have to address it up front and sort of apologize but also reassure fans that it’s a good thing. In any case, if you don’t have any qualms about Epic then this is a fantastic fucking deal if you jump on it quick enough, otherwise you can wait a year for it to hit Steam, hopefully with trading cards.

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Infinite Combate (PC/PS4/Switch) – Releases Aug. 11^th

Fans of the light novel DanMachi are in for a thrill because their favorite pansexual high fantasy manga is now a playable video game! Featuring all of your favorite humans and deities, you can choose to play as one of two characters, reliving the events of the anime series through a series of dungeon crawls and romantic rendezvous. I think the target audience for this game is about twenty five years younger than I am, so while I won’t be going anywhere near this title, I hope all of them have a blast with it.

Double Kick Heroes (PC/Switch) – Releases Aug. 13^th (XBone on Aug. 28^th)

I can’t remember which Nintendo Direct I saw the trailer for this in, but I’ve been stoked on it ever since. The game has been in early access on Steam for several months now, with a ton of content released over that time, but now it’s complete and ready for prime time. *Insert sick guitar lick*

Teenage Blob (PC) – Releases Aug. 13^th

It’s always nice getting one music game every once in a while, but to have TWO come out during the same week is like Xmas in August! Teenage Blob is unique, as it is more than just a video game, it’s a full blown album release. Punk rock fans should be familiar with the “split EP” concept, where two bands cover each other’s songs each and put out an album together. Hell, the band NOFX and folk singer Frank Turner just put one out last week! For this split video game EP, punk band The Superweaks, along with band/developer Team Lazerbeam, bring us the story of a typical teenager who must live through the worst day of their life to make sure they have the best night of their life. It looks like a wacky, retro inspired good time, and I’m so ready for it.

One of my favorite splits:

Next Stop Nowhere (Apple Arcade) – Releases Aug. 14^th

Having explored supernatural teenage angst in Oxenfree, and supernatural twenty-something angst in Afterparty, the team at Night School are back with a game that comments on thirty-something parental angst in outer space. Having loved Oxenfree, I am really looking forward to giving this one a shot on Apple Arcade which has, surprisingly, been hitting it out of the park recently with a handful of top notch games. It wasn’t long ago that I was ready to write the whole thing off, but Apple have really shown themselves to be committed to delivering some quality content for Arcade.

UFC 4 (PS4/Xbox One) – Releases Aug. 14^th

Hey, do you like beating the shit out of other people? Tight, then you should play this.

 

Expansions:

Dying Light: Hellraid (PC/PS4/Xbox One) – Releases Aug. 13^th

The development road for Hellraid has been an interesting one. The game was originally intended as a total conversion mod for the game Dead Island, but developer Techland was so impressed with it that they decided to transition it into its own full game, for release in 2015. Well, that obviously didn’t happen, and then the new consoles came out (PS4/XBone) so the team wanted to port the game to their new engine, delaying it in the process. Eventually someone at Techland decided enough was enough and it was time to cancel the game…sort of. You see, in the ensuing years, Techland had released a brand new hit IP, Dying Light, so why not salvage something from Hellraid? I’m sure tons of games are trashed every day that we never hear about, so for Techland to actually take parts of this game and incorporate it into Dying Light deserves a little bit of applause, I think, as I’m sure everyone who worked on it over the years is happy to see even a portion of their work in players hands. Described as a sort of spiritual successor to Hertic/Hexen Hellraid combines the frantic pace of Dead Island with the medieval fantasy setting of The Elder Scrolls. Sounds good to me.

 

Everything else:

Hyper Scape (PC/PS4/Xbox One) – Releases Aug. 11^th

Metamorphosis (PC/ps4/Switch/Xbox One) – Releases Aug. 12^th

Volta-X (PC/Switch) – Releases Aug. 12^th

 

Notable Releases from 10, 20 and 30 (and sometimes 40) years ago:

A trio of RPGs make up this week’s notable titles from yesteryear. From a long beloved Japanese series finally making a splash in the U.S., to a long awaited sequel, to an NES title that many of us have probably never heard of until today. Let’s go!

Ys Seven (PSP) – Released Aug. 17^th, 2010: Wiki Link

The Ys series has had a bit of a strange life in North America and Europe. While it has maintained a healthy release schedule in Japan for over thirty years, the game was practically ignored in the West for most of the 90’s, with a fourteen year gap between 1991’s Ys III and 2005’s Ys VI. Even after this gap, Western players would have to wait another five years for the next Ys title, despite three of them coming out in Japan in the ensuing years, two of which eventually made it over here. All this explanation is here just to say that in 2010, Western audiences finally got another Ys game, and it was from this point on that we were finally in parity with Japan for release dates (for the most part). In Ys Seven, series protagonist Adol Christin and his pal Dogi arrive in the seaside kingdom of Altago and set out to explore the town. While there they come across a group of Dragon Knights harassing a young woman and her sister, and decide to intervene. They are thrown in jail for their supposed transgression but quickly released by the king when he discovers that they are adventurers for hire. He tells Adol and Dogi that his kingdom is being ravaged by mysterious earthquakes, and that his Dragon Knight have been unable to determine the cause. With an ancient shrine as their only clue, Aldo and Dogi investigate the ruins, and stumble upon a terrible secret! Ys Seven was the first game in the series to go fully 3D after over 20 years of existing in the 2D realm in some form or another, and it also re-introduced the blocking mechanic, as well as added a new skill system, weapon types, EXTRA skills, the ability to parry hits, and a flash guard system (something that would be extended upon in future releases). Critical reception was positive, with many outlets praising the game for its deep combat and engaging story, but criticizing the amount of backtracking required and for the below average graphics. A PC port would come out in 2017 which improved the graphics a bit, but the game still shows its age. Despite this, it’s still a ton of fun and should be given kudos for finally making Ys a (sort-of) household name in the West.

Chrono Cross (PlayStation) – Released Aug. 17^th, 2000: Wiki Link

Finally, after three months we now have what is likely the crown jewel in Square’s Summer of Adventure, the epic Chrono Cross, with fans of the SNES game Chrono Trigger salivating over the chance to dive back into the strange and wonderful world of time traveling frogs and tragic robots from the future. To understand where Chrono Cross came from, we have to go back a few years to a little known Japan-only release called Radical Dreamers. This visual novel, released exclusively through the Satellaview service on the SNES, was a side story to Chrono Trigger and told the tale of a young woman named Kid and her two companions Serge and Gil, who are on a mission to steal a treasure called The Frozen Flame from the mansion of a mysterious character named Lord Lynx. If you’ve played Chrono Cross then this might sound strikingly similar to the opening hours of the game, and that’s because the PlayStation classic is a sort of re-make/expanded take on Radical Dreamers, neat, right? Series writer Masato Kato wanted to tell a full version of this story, but in doing so he knew that things would have to change based on new technology, and that in order to free himself creatively, he wanted it to be only tangentially related to Chrono Trigger. This is where the idea of parallel universes came into play. While Chrono Trigger was all about traveling to the same locations during different time periods, Chrono Cross‘ main feature was that players would travel between two different dimensions, one in which Serge, now the main protagonist, is alive and one in which he died as a child. Like Chrono Trigger, things you do in one time period/dimension have an impact on the others. For example, if you put out a fire in one dimension, there will now be floral growth in that spot in the other dimension, creating multiple puzzles to solve and secrets to discover.

As I mentioned in earlier Summer of Adventure game entries Vagrant Story and Threads of Fate, the traditional style of JRPG was being flipped on its head in many different ways in 1999/2000. While Chrono Cross still employed a turn based battle system, it had a few unique elements added to it. The most obvious one up front is the three types of physical attacks you can do, low, medium, and high, with each one having a decreasing percentage chance of hitting. However, if you successfully land a lower strength hit, the higher strength hits increase their chance of connecting. These hits would also fill a level gauge, allowing you to perform magic spells, which in Chrono Cross are called ‘elements’. These elements work in a similar fashion to the materia system in Final Fantasy VII, with players purchasing (or finding) them and equipping them to slots on a skill page. As your level increases you are allowed to equip more, and higher level, elements. One thing to note, most elements can only be used once per battle, so if you want to use ‘Fireball’ multiple times you’ll need to equip several of them. The element system is pretty much the entire focus of the battle system, as players and enemies have a particular affinity for certain elements, which come in six colors; red, blue, green, yellow, white, and black. Based on the affinity of the enemies you are facing, certain elements will hit harder or softer. On top of this, the play field, which is divided into three tiers, will also take on an affinity. Each time you use an element, the inner tier of the play field will take on that element’s color, pushing the previous color into the next tier. If all three tiers are the same color, those elements will hit harder, and it will also allow you to summon huge attacks or giants beasts. It is, admittedly, pretty confusing at first, and I am still struggling with how it all fully works, but I do enjoy the battle system overall. One big point that resonates with me, and likely many others, is the lack of grinding to be necessary to keep up with enemy strength. For years, RPG players played for the grind, spending hours and hours making their characters stronger in order to gain an advantage over their enemies. In Chrono Cross, while battles will occasionally increase your base stats by 1 or 2 points here and there, you really don’t see any significant increase in stats until you defeat a boss, at which point the game automatically levels you up.

As if there wasn’t already a ton of stuff that bucked traditional RPG trends, even the armor and weapon system wasn’t a straightforward affair anymore. Before, in titles like Final Fantasy, you would go to a town, buy the latest armor and weapons, and equip them; simple, right? Well, in Chrono Cross, players could not buy a simple new weapon or body piece, no, you had to craft it. Remember when I said that there wasn’t really a need for grinding? Well, that was kind of a lie, because enemies would drop these crafting materials that you needed to make your new sword. Oh, you could also purchase elements and trade those in for the crafting materials to various vendors, but that meant you needed gil, which again brought us back to grinding. We just couldn’t get away from it, could we? I’ve already spoiled the, roughly, first 10 hours of the game to you, so I won’t go much further (and honestly, I haven’t played it all the way through and I don’t want to read a full synopsis), but from what I am seeing from a critical standpoint, this story is amazing. With a whopping 45 playable characters, Chrono Cross comes with 13 different endings, which might seem like a lot, but originally the plan was to have 64 characters who all had their own unique endings, so, you know. There was a lot of pressure on the Chrono Cross team because of how well received and beloved Chrono Trigger was, a game that included a veritable “Dream Team” of talent, including Akira Toriyama, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu, Yuji Horii, and a plethora of the best artists, programmers, and developers Squaresoft had ever put together. When Chrono Cross finally released in the U.S., the consensus from critics and players was that director Masato Kato and his team had put out nothing short of a masterpiece, calling it one of the defining RPGs of the PlayStation era and one of the greatest games ever made.

However, not everybody was happy (surprise). There were some players who were disappointed in the lack of time travel, the change to 3D, and the decision to not include beloved Chrono Trigger characters, but to Kato, the Chrono series wasn’t about one character, or a strict adherence to the past, it was about the themes and evolution of technology, even stating this in a pre-release interview, saying, “Cross is undoubtedly the highest quality Chrono that we can create right now…If you can’t accept that, then I’m sorry to say this but I guess your Chrono and my Chrono have taken totally different paths. But I would like to say, thank you for falling in love with Trigger so much…the fans of the original are very important, but what innovation can come about when you’re bound to the past? I believe that gameplay should evolve with the hardware“. For a game series in which changes to the past can alter the future, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that its lead storyteller favored change and evolution. Sadly, as of this writing, Chrono Cross is the last game in this series. Despite strong sales and critical reception, the (unofficial) third game in the franchise, Chrono Break, failed to materialize, with internal politics at Squaresoft, and the departure of several team members over the years, making the possibility of a third game near impossible. However, elements of the Chrono series can be found in those departed team members other works, such as Final Fantasy XI, Xenosaga/Xenoblade, and Deep Labyrinth. Square Enix is always “open to the idea” of a new Chrono title, but without any of the original creative team would it even be the same? Maybe we should just let things be, as the events of the past have given us a brighter future, because Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger have left a lasting impression on all of us, and it’s influence is still seen today.

Swords and Serpents (NES) – Released Aug. 1990: Wiki Link

Before titles like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy popularized the overhead view style of dungeon exploration, most RPGs followed the Wizardry format of a first person perspective, forcing you to draw a physical map while you played in order to not get lost. Thankfully, as time went on, some of these games would evolve with the current technology and give you a digital map to view, making travel much less cumbersome and confusing. Case in point, Interplay’s 1990 NES dungeon crawler Swords and Serpents. Initially designed by a guy named Paul O’Connor, known for the PC game Dragon Wars which was a quasi spin-off of A Bard’s Tale, he would leave the project after two week for reasons that I can’t find. Another Dragon Wars designer, Bruce Schlickbernd, would take over duties from O’Connor and finish the game. Schlickbernd didn’t feel good about taking sole designer credit, so in a bizarre move, Interplay decided they wouldn’t credit anyone with the design of the game. As far as gameplay goes, the whole thing is fairly standard for an RPG. Players begin the game by either creating a four person party from scratch or using a prefabricated one, featuring a warrior, a thief, and two magicians. You are unceremoniously dropped into the lair of the serpent and told by an old man that you must collect seven ruby treasures and slay the dragon (er, serpent). From there you are off on your way, moving around the labyrinthine dungeon, looking for treasures, weapon & armor shops, new magic spells, and, of course, fighting monsters. It’s all a very tedious and slow affair, but I found myself running around the first level (there are 16 in all) killing creatures and gaining experience points for over an hour. There are certainly better RPGs out there that give a much more robust gameplay experience, but Swords and Serpents isn’t a bad way to waste a Sunday afternoon if you have nothing better going on.

I tried to find some interesting action shots of the game being played, but every single one is just an image of an empty hallway, so here it is in all its glory:

 

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