The Tyranny of Dragons was ended by two bands of adventurers on May 22, but there's still an epilogue to be delivered to the brave heroes. It's been a good four years and an awesome end to a long campaign.

Well, this was unexpected. Traipsing through biome 5 in Returnal got me to the challenge room there and with the Severed teleporting out of view, I resorted to covering the room with shots just in case he popped up... but he didn't...

Until the bastard did. 😛 Scared me senseless that.

An actual role-playing game. That's one way to describe Disco Elysium. You could also call it a visual novel or choose-your-own-adventure book. It's all perfectly valid. For better or worse, Disco Elysium has very few game mechanics. It has more in common with solo RPGs like Thousand Year Old Vampire.

You are an out-of-your-mind drunk detective waking up from one hell of a bender that has managed to turn you into that loveable RPG trope: the amnesiac. From there on out you try to catch your bearings and talk to others as you attempt to figure out what the hell is going on.

It is a trope, but never since Planescape: Torment has the trope been used to such great effect. Every little piece of information you manage to snatch from the world at-large feels like a revelation. Every item you get hold of, a treasure. And then there are the voices.

The voices...

One giant plus this version of Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - brings to the table, is that everything is fully voiced. That includes the voices in your head. In a neat tabletop-RPG inspired twist, every skill you possess produces an internal voice and will more often than not butt in where (in)appropriate.

Visual Calculus might coolly describe the ballistics of a firefight, while Savoir Faire might notice the cover used. Talk to a witness and Authority might cut in and demand answers, even though Encyclopedia is obsessed with the political statement their clothing harbour, and Composure is without a clue.

It's a strange form of guided free association and it's where the role-playing rubber hits the game road. Will you follow the cues of the voices in your head or not? Even when you think there are skills that can only be a positive to your character, they can be blunt tools in the wrong environment.

The responses and results of skill use are almost always worth the effort or the failure. There are genuine laugh-out-loud moments, the likes of which I've only seen around tabletops covered with books, papers, pencils, and dice. Here is a game that within 10 minutes of starting it, has you thinking about replaying it with a completely different character build, just to see what happens.

That said, its role-playing roots are most definitely felt in what you do, or rather what response you choose. If you're used to the aforementioned Planescape: Torment, this will not offer you "combat". Even Monkey Island had more of a conflict state with its cow-like sword fights. This is for all intents and purposes a text based game.

The voice acting, the design, and the sheer audacity of the game's setting more than make up for it and it's never not satisfying, but be warned: this is a hardcore role-playing game. So hardcore in fact, that the one time I did engage in "combat", I was completely caught off guard as a tsunami of emotions washed over me. I left the game untouched for a few minutes - leaving it hanging on the Continue command - as I came to terms with what the hell I was doing and why this was a thing.

It has multiple of these moments, where the reality of the game bends so far backwards, its surface becomes a mirror. The game might not have you grinding for XP, but it will pick every nook and cranny of your brain, resulting in an almost cathartic personality test. It's an incredible achievement and like the best of its ilk, the game will linger in your mind long after the credits roll, as you marvel at what you experienced and wonder about what you did not.

If only you could forget everything and start anew...

You can clearly identify one line in Control as being the worst. Which is quite a feat in a game that has so many bad lines. But without further ado, here it is: "That was awesome!"

The main issue with that line is context (of course); it is said out loud by the main protagonist after, yes, the most awesome sequence within the entire game. The sad part is that the game doesn't allow you to come to this conclusion yourself. You need it to be spoon-fed to you.

Which is Control's main issue throughout the game. As its plot and setting mixes up the serious conspiracies of The X-Files with the dark humour of Portal, you'll also find some notes of House of Leaves in there. Sadly those notes are completely overpowered by the game's tendency to explain just about everything. The protagonist Jesse constantly expresses her internal monologue to the player as interruptions and it's killing any sense of mystery.

Having Jesse verbalise her observations so directly makes them canon within the context of the game and eliminates any ideas the player might have. While most stories tackling these subjects go off on a wild scavenger hunt, making you question every last scrap of information you can find, Control wants to have its cake and eat it too. Yup, here's the scavenger hunt, but 5 minutes later you're being told exactly what the mystery is.

The game is constantly spoiling itself on its major beats, not letting you revel in your own conclusions. There's no feeling of figuring it out. It's the main reason its finale falls flat on its face and doesn't linger in the mind. Actually, thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if these internal monologues have all been added as a last ditch effort to make the game 'accessible' to a larger audience.

There are more oddities. The game's incessant focus on collecting mods for your weaponry, and doing so through either tacked on side-quests or tacked on loot-box crafting elements, is utterly bizarre. It doesn't fit the game at all, which is much more at home at being a tightly designed shooting romp through Bauhaus architecture with supernatural abilities spliced into it. Shooting your way through a climactic scene? Here's a full screen notification that you can kill 10 low level enemies in a previously completed environment for a chance of a +2% accuracy bonus!

All of this is silly and only seems to be there to give the idea that Control is "a big AAA-game for grown-ups with all the latest features". Ironically it's exactly those features that makes the game drop to almost B-tier levels. The constant inventory management and dubious calls-to-action only manage to take you out of the game's atmosphere.

A terrific shame indeed as you can find audio logs, letters, reports, and videos all over the place. The building's interior decorations and all of their extrapolations are just grand and cohesive. It's a confusing mess, but at a certain point it does start to feel like home, or rather: a workplace.

There's a great and dark sense of humour involved as well, as the game makes it clear that everyday objects could house supernatural powers varying in usefulness and range. A floppy disk giving you superpowers. A fridge killing people the moment it's not being watched. A sticky note infinitely replicating itself until it covers every surface in the room. It's this weird and wonderful mess of tonal shifts that brings out the best in Control. Here's a tale of a bureaucratic organisation trying it darnedest to bring comprehensible order to misunderstood chaos, to actually exert control while often simply failing at it.

It's beautiful in its presentation even though many of its human characters fall into a weird uncanny valley in terms of looks. Luckily, the weirdness kind of fits in with the orderly chaotic nature of it all. But apart from that hiccup, the sounds and visuals do a terrific job at bringing everything together. There are vistas that are unexpected and genuinely surprising (even though 5 seconds later Jesse will tell you that and how to feel about it) and the level of destruction possible makes it all tangible.

Which makes it a bit sad that the tonal shifts deployed in audio-visual presentation don't really gel in game design. You could say the wonky RPG-lite sauce du jour and the solid and enjoyable gun-play are just as weird a mixture, but in that particular case, the sauce threatens to overwhelm the main course.

In a way, I'd almost wish there was less to Control. As it is, I'm more in love with its world and lore than the game per sé and kind of miffed the game threw the lid down so hard when it did end. Hopefully a potential sequel can iron out those weird game mechanics, so Control can happily lose itself in itself a bit more.

Now that would be awesome.

I really liked 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Of course, that has to do with it being a Vanillaware game as I do have a soft spot for the studio's output. The audaciousness of the concept and its story is pretty alluring on its own though.

Here is a game that seems to be a Japanese visual novel with a hunger for 80s nostalgia, mixed with a light strategy role-playing game, and topped off with a Wikipedia breadcrumb binge. It's perfect in none of those categories, yet this weird mix seems to work in the end, jaw hinging slightly ajar.

Spoilers ahead.

The Good

• Story-wise, I was genuinely surprised at the overlap in setting between this and Horizon Zero Dawn. Not that these two games are the only titles discussing a post-post-apocalypse setting, but both envision a future where humanity as a whole lost, went into hibernation as a last ditch effort, and finds adversaries in the very tools that were designed to help them.
  Where Zero Dawn fails for me, is that the setting's origin is almost freakishly more interesting than the actual plot of the game. 13 Sentinels does not have this issue, instead the setting is the plot and grafted into the characters' actions as a whole. Zero Dawn has, in comparison, a large divide between plot and setting, with Aloy forming the sole lynchpin holding them together. It kind of works, but it makes it very hard to care about anything beyond the core mystery. This is emphasised by her outsider status in more ways than one. Unfortunately, it means the rest of the world can go to hell for me as a player. The only incentive there lies with Aloy and the actual Zero Dawn.
  Whether intentional or not, 13 Sentinels doesn't touch the 'what happened after' part at all. It squarely focuses on the connection between the characters and the world they inhabit. Everyone is an Aloy here, almost verbatim. And instead of being told what happened, you're experiencing it first-hand, while not being entirely clued in that you are. It makes for a delightful puzzle (I — quite wrongly — thought I had the story figured out at least five times during the course of the game) and makes sure that every aspect of it adds to solving it. It was the video game equivalent of Netflix's Dark. In comparison, if you take away all the extra tribes and people in Zero Dawn, and are just left with Aloy, the machines, and the mystery of Zero Dawn itself, then I'm quite positive the game would be just as enjoyable. Maybe even more so. Regardless, I feel 13 Sentinels nails this particular aspect and provides and maintains interest throughout its entire runtime. Or, as Dirk Gently would have it: "everything is connected".
• The combat reminded me of Dungeons & Dragons in that battles take about 2 minutes according to the mission timer, but taking actual turns expands this tenfold in real time.
• You can tweak the hell out of the visual novel settings in terms of subtitles and voice work. Spend a few minutes setting it up and the visual novel part can act and feel like an experimental anime.
• The game has a tendency to present you with far-fetched concepts that add to the general weirdness, only to dispel them and replace them with even harsher in-game realities and make them all part of the plan. Granted, some instances work better than others, but damn. That's good.
• By ye gods, does this look fine. Even the radar graphics during the strategy RPG parts have their charms.
• While Dragon's Crown's insane body proportions raised more than a few eyebrows, 13 Sentinels seems to me a lot more self-aware of what it's presenting. Yes, you do see a young woman caress her thigh to summon a giant mecha within minutes of starting the game, but by the end of the game it has earned the right to use that scene and call it logical. Kind of.
  It won't please everybody, but I did get the idea the game is trying to display teenage insecurities instead of just throwing around some skin. That said, you could argue the game is pulling a 'Quiet' where the cockpits are concerned, but even that is allowed to make a whole lot more sense in comparison. YMMV.

The Bad

• The thought cloud concept was interesting, but also a bit of a failure. A subject being mentioned can trigger them as conversation topics for internal monologues and external dialogues. Unfortunately, that never amounted to anything more than providing additional information. That in itself is not problematic, as the game's currency is basically information, but it means there's zero challenge in the visual novel elements. It's exhausting all options without consequence. Feels like they missed a potential trick with this kind of setup as the branches in the storyline are merely options as well and don't require much insight or cunning.
• Combat could use some additional balancing. The game is a bit on the easy side and even provides an easy mode — which isn't bad, actually. The problems are with the upgrades available when levelling up. There are a lot of them, but considering the simplistic radar-like presentation of the game they don't feel very different or amount to stat changes. The game practically plays itself when you unlock the Sentries and unintentionally turns the actual game part of this game into a slog. I guess it does fit the Vanillaware tradition of making one combat thing work and repeating it ad infinitum.

The Ugly

• If you're not used to Japanese, the cast of characters and their names are going to be a nightmare. Even if you are used to the language, thirteen protagonists and a whole host of supporting characters means you will drop the ball at some point. You may want to keep a notebook nearby.

I distinctly remember being disappointed with the concept of Yakuza when it was first announced. Here was the designer behind one of the most pure gaming experiences ever (Super Monkey Ball) and for some reason he was now making another Shenmue. I skipped it entirely, being reminded of the sour aftertaste of Yu Suzuki's project and the splash Grand Theft Auto III made. Yakuza felt like Sega's attempt to wrestle back in on a booming genre it helped create, rather than an authentic game.

I'm also known to be a complete idiot at times.

I'm now playing through Yakuza Kiwami and I'm rather happy to discover I'm wrong. It's probably helped by getting to play this for the first time with all the touch ups of a remaster, but the idea that I once thought this not to be authentic is just painful.

If anything, walking through Yakuza's virtual streets gives me a pang of vacation nostalgia for having walked through similar districts in Japan. From the outlandish approach to signage to an impossibly cramped collection of miniature bars, everything feels real. Sure, graphics, animation and such might still be mediocre, but that's not the point. This is the vibe of an entertainment district carbon copied. The only disappointment is that I can't enter every building.

It feels so authentic even, that while Final Fantasy VII Remake's Wall Market gave me some recognisable chills, it absolutely pales in comparison to Yakuza. That's despite Remake's graphic prowess being better in every other aspect.

The story is also way more engaging than what Shenmue attempted. It goes from riches back to rags, neatly taking away your skills and abilities in a way that makes sense (long-time incarceration). When it does put you back on the streets, it does so in a district that has moved on, giving you multiple strained relationships to boot.

Video games often hark on movie clichés to facilitate their own storylines, but also have trouble making them work within their own framework. Yakuza manages to use them and retain the atmosphere of such films at the same time. Layered on top of a glorious entertainment district it feels right. It certainly has a more film-like feel to it than I expected. Even if it is peppered with comical interludes.

I do have to note that I didn't start off well with this game. Combat during its opening hours felt sluggish, unfair, and superfluous at the same time. There's no proper introduction to get you into the flow of combat. Instead it throws you into life or death situations, without providing much low-stakes training beforehand. For a couple of hours I struggled to understand its combat system, getting beat up by the gloriousness that is Majima over and over again. Frustrated, I left it, picked it up again a week later, and presto! No problems whatsoever. Maybe playing some Street of Rage 4 before that first attempt wasn't such a good idea.

In any case, I'm now pretty happy to roam the alleys and streets, taking out street punks wherever I can, whilst sampling nightlife food and drink. Guess I just needed to have some sense knocked into me first.

I'm not sure what I expected when starting watching Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I can however say that it's one of the most annoyingly insulting anime out there. In a good way.

Like Dragon Ball Z, it's basically an excuse to watch glorified grand bouts become grander and more glorious with each passing episode. And like DBZ it starts leaning on deus ex machina excuses hard.

In the end I wasn't as much entertained by the fights as I was by the increasingly insane reasonings of why such-and-so gained the upper hand for a few seconds. Someone jumping off a cliff only to be in a plane in the next scene was the most hard of cuts made this way and I must say, it was the only one I truly disliked. All the other zaniness in techniques, tricks, and skills were actually handled quite nicely and within the series' own context.

It's still absolute trash, yet I keep watching. I can now wholly understand how this turned into a meme-source and I haven't even touched Stardust Crusaders yet. Good trash it is.