I’m not the most competitive of gamers. I enjoy going head-to-head with friends and strangers in competition to an extent, but I’ve never been skilled enough to regularly be a “top gamer”. The closest was during my teenage years where my brother and his friends from College would invite me to play some fighting games with them. I came off like some sort of prodigy, adapting to any new game’s systems within a few matches and becoming a top contender. I thought I was “skilled” until I began attending a university filled with fighting game fanatics that lived, ate, and breathed joysticks, frame counts, and combos. Simultaneously, my favorite modes during LAN parties of Unreal Tournament 2K4 were the PvE focused Invasion and the objective-driven Assault. Anything that counted on twitchy reflexes to stack on the kills was far less enjoyable because I would rarely break into the middle rankings.
I think Destiny 2’s competitive Crucible mode had left me feeling bitter towards any player-versus-player activity altogether. Games such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe notwithstanding, I was sick of going toe-to-toe with players far more obsessed with Destiny 2 and its systems than I was, all while chasing bounties and quests that required me to stack up kills. It’s bad enough that I knew I wasn’t on top of the rankings, but to demand a specific kill-count with specific weapons is to effectively punish anyone that fails to measure up with the wannabe digital athletes that live on those maps. Crucible effectively killed my interest in anything that wasn’t player-versus-environment.
Then, on a whim, I decided to start playing Splatoon 2 on Saturday mornings. I wasn’t quite feeling the hype for its upcoming sequel yet, and I had long since abandoned it as my friends were all gaming elsewhere. Nonetheless, I wanted to brush my skills up a bit for the sequel and so decided to dip myself back into its reservoir of chromatic ink.
I can’t believe I had forgotten how much I loved this game.
Hi-Score Girl’s alluring seduction comes first and foremost from its nostalgic representation of 1990’s arcade games. Granted, those rose-tinted goggles are specifically fit to peer into the past of Japan’s arcades rather than America’s, but many children and teenagers of the 90’s will revel in the excitement and thrill of competitive Street Fighter II and the evolution that fighting games would experience throughout the decade.
However, viewers will also have to endure the constant and feverish narration of protagonist Haruo Yaguchi. The young, shameless slacker speaks at a million words a minute and with such intensity that it can be a rare exercise in mental exhaustion just to watch more than a few episodes. If you’ve selected the original Japanese voices, that is. I’ve no clue how the English dub sounds and doubt I’ll be finding out anytime soon. Regardless, initial impressions of Haruo are not exactly positive, as he seems like a somewhat greedy, ignorant child, and definitely not the sort to find himself embroiled in a youthful love triangle.
Only he does, and no doubt many will wonder just how he finds himself in such a situation given how clueless he seems to be regarding thoughts of romance and love. That, however, is part of the magic of Hi-Score Girl. By the end of the third episode you’ll be struck in the gut to see how cruel fate can be. Episode four then shifts perspective to a far more calm and soft-spoken character’s inner monologue to not only provide reprieve from Haruo’s high speed chatter, but to better understand his appeal. It would be a mistake to confuse Hi-Score Girl with any other average love triangle romantic comedy, though. Our protagonist may start out as an immature child – what with being a child and all – but through the course of the series, the audience will watch him grow, mature, and improve himself little by little.
All because he never even realized he had fallen in love at such a young age.
My self-deprecating brain would most likely describe myself as a poor excuse for an adult, pointing to my history of irresponsible purchasing habits as Exhibit A. Nonetheless, by taking on the impossible task of “pile management”, I have successfully learned to stop buying as many games as when I first entered the full-time work force. I no longer purchase a game just because it looked somewhat interesting, because it has been increasingly hyped by the games press and feels “necessary” to play, or because I know I want to play it, even if I cannot play it now.
...well, most of the time. Deeply discounted sale items are still an achilles’ heel of mine.
After being burned by so many of these “prestigious” or “highly regarded” titles and finding myself with too many titles and not enough time, I’ve finally begun to purchase more responsibly and better tackle the “pile”. However, in order to tackle this “pile” I had begun to meticulously track what games I was playing, which I had beaten, and listing out all the unplayed or incomplete titles that I now wanted to “schedule” time for. It was its own form of stress, and only a few months ago did I finally break free of its hold.
In other words, my gaming time has been determined by some self-imposed sense of pressure or duty rather than my wants or mood for far too long. While it has gradually been giving way to more impulsively following desire, such as my now thoroughly developed love of replaying great titles, it is only recently that I’ve thrown any sort of pressure or schedule to the wind for the sake of playing what I want in the moment. Unfortunately for the content mill, this means there are gaps where I may not have something stirring up a desire to write or discuss it (though, to be fair, this was true even when I was intentionally trying to play nothing but games new to me). Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have not completed something and therefore felt comfortable discussing. While Elden Ring and Ghostwire: Tokyo were strong enough contenders to fill multiple blog posts regardless of whether they were finished or not, anything else I’ve recently played has failed to make the same impact.
As such, I have decided to put together a sort of “catch-up” entry, with little mini-discussions about what I’ve played the past couple of months. Hopefully I’ll have items of greater substance for you in the near future.
I can now confirm that the combat to Ghostwire: Tokyo is not as shallow as many reviewers claim it to be. The problem, as I had suspected, is that there’s not enough incentive to make use of protagonist Akito’s full suite of abilities. It is not unlike the original Assassin’s Creed, where any player could rely upon Altair’s counterattack to progress through any combat scenario. It did not matter that there were a slew of other offensive or defensive abilities the player could learn to more efficiently slaughter a group of guards. Why would it? The bare minimum skill was good enough, and therefore the critics – all of whom are theoretically paid to explore what a game is capable of – called it shallow.
It’s not fair for me to push all the blame on writers and reviewers, for they did what most players would do: rely on the most simple, basic strategy necessary for a positive outcome. The blame I lay is for the critics’ failure to fully explore the game and give a more informed opinion than your average poster on Reddit. The problem with Assassin’s Creed is the emphasis on broad appeal, designing a game so that the less skillful players could still complete it with minimal resistance. Ghostwire: Tokyo has done the very same.
I believe it was Steve, my podcast co-host, that was trying to coin a term regarding “minimal viable strategy”; a concept executed to varying degrees throughout games of the past. Do you know how many people can beat Bloodborne, any of the Dark Souls entries, or Elden Ring without capitalizing on status ailments or equipment resistance? Though punishing, From Software specializes in a difficult combat design that makes minimum viable strategies possible. There are also a slew of more complex, highly skill-based tactics, strategies, and builds available, but you do not need them to complete their games. What’s more, the minimal viable strategy still involves studying the enemy’s behavior, dodging, guarding, or parrying at opportune times, calmly striking only when the opponent is vulnerable. This is still more complex than the “wait to press the Y button” minimum viable strategy of Assassin’s Creed, and as a result is perceived as being more deep and rewarding. Despite this minimum viable strategy, however, the game is still difficult enough to incentivize players to explore the deeper mechanics in order to better combat and outsmart their foes.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is not as easy as Assassin’s Creed, but it’s also not as difficult as a From Software game. It sits in this strange limbo where a player must consciously ask themselves if it’s worth exploring those additional yet unnecessary combat options.
If they do, then many of the tasks throughout the rest of the game will prove more rewarding… but is it still enough to make the game worthy of recommendation? That’s a difficult question to answer.
Comments