It feels like an annual tradition to gripe about how the current year is the worst ever. It’s a social media trend as predictable as the immediate outrage to the latest Facebook interface update. As melodramatic as I find the ritualistic whinging to be, however, even I cannot help but feel 2020 has been uncharacteristically depressing. Much of that has to do with the social isolation inflicted by Covid-19, but there are several other factors that have regularly dragged my mood down throughout the past several months.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to seek solace in video games, just as I’m sure many others have. Unfortunately, the vast majority of games I’ve dabbled in have been met with some degree of apathy or disinterest. Even if I enjoyed playing them for a little while, few had legitimate staying power.

For that reason I decided it might be worthwhile to collect what thoughts I have on those incomplete games, feigning a sense of productivity rather than acknowledging that time could have been better spent doing something else. 2020 is evidently the year in which I’m a gaming tourist, taking the occasional trip into a title before bouncing off into another fictional world.

What better place to kick such tourism off than with a visit to the underworld itself.

DARKSIDERS: GENESIS

Perhaps the most prophetic sign of the disappointing year to come is my general apathy towards the latest entry in a favorite franchise. I expected Darksiders II to be the black sheep of the series after Darksiders III gloriously revived it from THQ’s tomb. As laborious as that second game could become, however, it at least still managed to maintain engaging combat and acrobatic dungeon design. “Too much of a good thing” perhaps summarizes that game best, as it simply has too many realms and dungeons that it becomes stretched thin.

Darksiders: Genesis, on the other hand, is bland. There is no depth to the combat. War imitates many of his signature moves from the inaugural title, but the execution of said strikes is far more automatic. Many people view hack-and-slash character action as “button mashy”, but it is Genesis that reduces the action to such simplistic and repetitive prompts. Being able to swap between War and Strife provides some degree of engagement, but it is not enough to generate the excitement the franchise is known for.

I think the real flaw of the game, however, is that the limited budget was not compensated through ingenuity or imagination. The original title was effectively character action combined with Zelda whereas the second became character-action meets Diablo meets Prince of Persia meets Zelda. By the third, it was character-action meets Dark Souls meets Metroid: Prime. In each of these fusions, there is an element of exploration with a consistent world. In Darksiders: Genesis, it’s simply an isometric hack-and-slash through linear worlds. I was concerned that there’d be loot mechanics like in Diablo, but there’s no interesting mechanics to make up for the simplicity and budget drop.

The best move for developer Airship Syndicate would have been to lean hard into that Zelda inspiration, only from the overhead two-dimensional perspective rather than the obvious influence of Ocarina of Time’s 3D world. Even if the combat would have been more simplified, exploration of the world could have allowed the game to stand out as an enjoyable, engaging experience.

I’ve been intending to go back just so I can play through and complete Darksiders: Genesis, but I honestly keep forgetting the game even exists. It should have been a wonderful start to my gaming year, and instead turned into the first major letdown. It is 2020 in video game form.

ANTHEM
I don’t actually dislike Anthem. Perhaps there have been enough patches to the game to have put it into a more tolerable state since launch, but I actually enjoyed what time I spent with it. In fact, I’d say it manages to do the daily, weekly, and monthly challenges in a far better and more rewarding manner than Bungie has managed with the Destiny 2 bounties.

The problem is that’s about the only thing it does better than Destiny 2. The game is otherwise an inconsistent and schizophrenic disaster desperately trying to figure out who its target audience is. The player is forced to explore a pseudo-social zone where walk speed is excruciatingly slow and their only companions are NPCs unfamiliar with the word “brevity”. BioWare has become so overconfident in their writing chops that they’ve lost all restraint. Every non-player character speaks volumes of noise empty of meaning or purpose. Their personalities feel like fan-fiction archetypes devoid of humanity. In other words, they’ve somehow made their “social” zone more laborious to visit than the tower in Destiny 2.

Also more laborious is the effort to sit down and actually play with your friends. Some days it seems that I, as party leader, can see each quest my co-op partners need to complete in order to progress. It seemed clear that, so long as you yourself had finished that quest or had it logged as an active mission, you could see it fine on the map screen. Other days, the only quests that appear are my own. There’s also no indication of which quest belongs to whom, increasing the odds that a lower-leveled ally will be dropped into a scenario they’re not equipped for.

Not that “being under-leveled” was much of a problem for long. There’s a particular vendor within the game that sells high-powered gear at surprisingly affordable prices. Once we all got access to her, every mission turned into a cake walk.

We’ve still not completed Anthem. It was a nice diversion from Destiny 2, all things told. A diversion is about all it is good for, unfortunately.

Phantasy Star Online 2

Another attempt to find a potential replacement or supplement to Destiny 2. I had heard many good things about Phantasy Star Online from friends that played the original on Dreamcast, GameCube, or Xbox. I never had a chance to play it myself, however, which is why I decided to take the chance on Phantasy Star Online 2 once Microsoft announced it’d be free on Xbox.

Unfortunately, I had already played Final Fantasy XIV before then. I knew what an MMO could be, even if I abandoned that game due to my fear of playing online with strangers. My brief time with XIV provided a gorgeous game world whose combat was reminiscent of Dragon Age: Origins on console, though far more relaxed and laid back. It felt polished, and while its interface clearly favored the PC first, I was able to make due with the PlayStation 4’s controller.

Phantasy Star Online 2 feels out of date by comparison. This should come as no surprise as the game originally launched in Japan in 2010, but its combat and enemy A.I. are so simplified that it had me yearning for the low-budget excitement of Crystar. The interface was also designed with PC in mind, but it felt so much more obnoxious here than it had with Final Fantasy XIV. It did not help that so much unique terminology and exposition was shoved into my face at once that I found myself confused when I signed back on a mere week or two later. Every window only left me feeling more confused rather than helping remind me what the intended game loop was.

By time you get into the actual combat and quests Phantasy Star Online 2 is engaging enough to be relaxing. I could immediately tell that there was no way it would replace Destiny 2 as the regular game played with my friends. Even Anthem was more successful in that regard.

Dark Souls 1 & 3

“Maybe I ought to give Dark Souls a second chance,” I thought to myself after having plugged somewhere between sixty-to-eighty hours into Bloodborne. Several years ago I had written the game off for good after falling before the Taurus Demon several times. For those familiar with the game, you know this as the first major boss outside of the tutorial zone. To me, it was representative of the jank and quirkiness of From Software games that its fanbase seemed unwilling to acknowledge.

While I did manage to vanquish the Taurus Demon this time, I have found myself similarly stuck against the Gargoyles that act as the next boss encounter. I know I similarly had doubts of being able to defeat many of the Bloodborne bosses solitary, but there is just something in Dark Souls that makes it all the more frustrating to fail repeatedly. I decided to give Dark Souls 3 a try as it supposedly is faster-paced, but I no longer believe it is the pace of Bloodborne that makes it more appealing. Not exclusively, at least.

I don’t have enough experience with the different titles, but I feel that Bloodborne’s mechanics, though brutal, are also more forgiving of mistakes. Despite enemy strikes dealing more damage than those in the Souls games, the blood vials are far more plentiful to stock than Estus Flasks. You can also find blood vials off the bodies of fallen foes, whereas you can only replenish the Estus Flask at a bonfire. Healing is, therefore, much more commonly available, even if the lethality of each foe’s strikes has increased. The riposte is also executed with a ranged weapon, meaning the player does not have to be within striking distance of their enemy to stagger an incoming attacker or put them into a stunned position.

Yes, the game is also quicker, but I feel like that may be the least of differences that makes it more preferable to me.

It’s possible that if I were to play co-op, I’d be able to more effectively learn and appreciate Dark Souls just as I had Bloodborne. However, just as blood vials are more plentiful than the Estus Flask, this is another area where a minor change makes all the difference. Bloodborne requires the far more plentiful Insight in order to co-op, but Dark Souls requires the summoning player to possess and activate Humanity, which can be lost upon death. Another area where Bloodborne feels more forgiving despite being a far more violent and brutal world.

Even as I type this I wonder if I ought to try Dark Souls again. However, I feel as if I’d much rather play through Bloodborne or Darksiders 3 once more, as I find those games far more rewarding… though admittedly, that’s also only because they’ve become more familiar.

Continued in Part Two…