My Thoughts on Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: Justine

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a game in which you explore a shadowy Gothic castle full of forbidden secrets with a lantern, so naturally I like it quite a bit. But while it succeeds at creating a constantly foreboding atmosphere through an excellent mix of unsettling sound design and a great use of light and darkness, I’d be lying if I said Amnesia fully lived up to its reputation for me. Chiefly, the experience just didn’t spook me as much as I thought it would. Don’t get me wrong though, Amnesia has some great spooks and is certainly an extremely tense experience. For one thing, it does jump scares well, often staying its hand the first three times I expected to shit my pants and then turning me into a jittery, jumpy mess unable to properly function on the fourth, unexpected time. I also like the way the game’s mechanics play off of each other. For example, if the player stays in dark areas for too long, they begin to lose “sanity” which leads to vision and control problems. Staying in the light keeps one sane but also exposes them to roving monsters. In order to stay out of sight of a creeping horror, you often need to hunker down in the darkness as you slowly, unnervingly lose sanity. Neat trade-offs like this add to the overall tenseness of the experience. Speaking of creeping horrors, perhaps my favorite part of Amnesia is how it handles its monsters. You can’t fight back in Amnesia, so your only option is to run or hide. Monsters almost always appear when you least want them to and when they spot you, they shamble towards you at a deceptively quick pace. But what I really love about them isn’t actually the creatures themselves but everything that accompanies their presence. You are penalized for looking directly at them by a blurry, disorientating screen and a loss of sanity (which you’re going to want to keep in order to effectively run away and hide), which I think is just brilliant. In fact, if it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t even really know what the creatures looked like besides being vaguely humanoid monstrosities. My favorite aspect of monster encounters, however, is the brilliant, intensifying dissonance that blares into your ears as they lurch closer and closer towards you, which never failed to unravel my nerves and make me clench my teeth as I accidently hit the ‘crouch’ key instead of the ‘sprint’ one for the seventeenth time.

There’s a lot done very well in Amnesia but when going into it, I guess I expected a deeply unnerving psychological horror experience; I expected to be wandering scared and delirious and alone in the dark while being hunted by barely glimpsed horrors, never really sure what was going on. And while the game comes close to this type of experience at times, Amnesia is ultimately a lot more formulaic and “gamey” than I anticipated, especially after its introduction message sets it up as, and I paraphrase, an “immersive experience that shouldn’t be played to win”. The experience is divided up into several hub areas, or large safe zones, with several sub-areas branching off of them, and the game soon falls into a formula of getting to a new hub and going around its areas, collecting notes and items, solving puzzles, and occasionally having a monster thrown at you. There are also “interim” areas between each hub that contain some of the best moments of the game, as well as a few other curveballs that shake the formula up a bit. This all isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I actually quite enjoyed the experience’s traditional survival horror elements, but it all just felt a little too “safe” a lot of the time. And while I have a lot of love for the way the monster encounters are handled and while they are still very effective, sadly evading these eldritch abominations is often far too easy (at least the standard monsters); hiding behind a couple of boxes at a dead end was often enough to confound them and I only was caught by them once (after which the game dumped me in a random room I hadn’t been in yet, which confused me greatly…do the monsters actually kill Daniel? Or is he being revived somehow?). Once in a safe hiding place, one only needs to stay put for a few minutes until the creatures shamble off and disappear entirely.

There are other factors as well that kept Amnesia from being the scariest of scares for me. The Gothic castle setting is something I have too much affection for to be truly unsettled by (the game brought to mind both Dracula and Castlevania for me, and sometimes while skulking through a dungeon with my lantern lit, I was reminded of something out of The Legend of Zelda or some other comforting fantasy experience). The game is also very chatty; what is supposed to be a dark and lonely atmosphere is often interrupted by campy voice acting, whether in the entries of Daniel’s diary strewn about or the frequent flashback conversations between Daniel and Alexander. Besides this, Amnesia is a game composed of both brilliant scares and laughably goofy ones. Creepy statues suddenly appearing inside of bloody fountains and then being mysteriously gone the next time I look in their direction is a fantastic way of freaking me out, and dashing through a water-logged basement labyrinth being chased by loud, invisible horrors is one of the most purely terrifying moments in any game for me (along with a few other similarly tense moments in the game). But then there are the times when you turn a corner and the screen contracts accompanied by a spoooooky noise and some spoooooky dust clouds puffing about which are decent enough in the early sections of the game, but when these tame “scares” still happen occasionally even late in the game, it reminds me of a cardboard ghost popping out and saying “BOO!” in a haunted house. The sound design, for that matter, is mostly good and sometimes brilliant (mainly during monster encounters), but is also sometimes far too busy and consistent. What I mean is that while exploring some areas, the same random background combination of disembodied footsteps, fluttering paper, and soft whimpering chatters in my speakers constantly until it’s no longer unsettling but just mundane background noise. The same sound effects and musical cues are recycled throughout the game, so by the end they did little to disturb me. I suppose I’ve been spoiled by the masterful transformative sound design in the early Silent Hill games, where often you’ll hear a very specific creepy noise in one specific location and never hear it again…and never forget it again. Even though Amnesia is unpredictable on a moment to moment basis, it has a predictable nature to it in the grand scheme of things and this goes a long way in diminishing the horror for me. Ultimately, Amnesia just didn’t get under my skin the way I expected it to; it’s more of an in the moment “oh boy I’m having fun being spooked in this game” experience than a lingering kind of horror that I can’t help but ruminate on when I’m closing my eyes trying to sleep at night. In a game with a sanity meter, that is seemingly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, and subtitled “The Dark Descent”, I expected this experience to get to me more psychologically than viscerally, but the opposite is true. This is both a disappointment and a relief, if you catch my drift. Also, full disclaimer, I only played this game alone late at night with all the lights off with headphones and the sound turned up, as it should be, so I certainly made myself vulnerable to the experience’s frights.

While Amnesia isn’t the kind of horror I was expecting, and maybe isn’t even the kind of horror I feel it’s going for a lot of the time, it’s not a bad horror experience. I quite enjoy its Gothic atmosphere and its traditional survival horror/adventure game elements and while I criticized it for diminishing the fright, I also enjoy its campiness to an extent. It also undoubtedly succeeds very well at momentarily tense and terrifying moments that made me want to just give up and curl up in a ball in the corner with a blankie. And since I most often didn’t quite know what was going to be around the next corner or at the bottom of those stairs leading into a dark void, it also did a nice job of keeping me on edge most of the time even outside of those sharply intense moments. I found the narrative intriguing enough as well, if not a bit muddily delivered. Exposition is fed to the player in so many different ways (scattered notes, flashbacks, random whispers, weird memory canisters, snippets of random text thrown at the player in the game’s brief loading screens and so on) that it becomes a bit overwhelming. I also feel that the game’s writing simply does a poor job of conveying information at times; some notes are unclearly-written while others seem to contradict information presented elsewhere and even within their own text. It’s not that the text is purposefully vague, but rather it just seems awkwardly written in places, and for me at least, some pieces of the story don’t seem to add up. The game’s finale also kind of infuriated me at first as well. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling too much but basically one’s ending is decided by what they do in the last three or so minutes of the game. I sort of predicted something like this would be coming, and I knew what I wanted to do, but the ending sequence was just very unclear to me my first time encountering it and there is a very brief amount of time that decides whether all your hard work throughout the adventure will pay off or, like in my initial experience, be rewarded with the most horrible ending I could have asked for all because I stalled for a few seconds and wasn’t exactly sure what I should be doing to achieve the goal I wanted. After the credits abruptly rolled to my extreme annoyance and confusion, I was able to think clearly and figure out what I should have done. I was then able to reload my save and get the other two endings, but I was still frustrated by the first ending that I got. I can accept an “unhappy ending”, especially in a horror game, but when I have the agency to make a choice, and it’s unclear what choice I’m exactly making or rather how to make the choice that I want to make, and then something happens that I absolutely didn’t want to happen and the game frames it like it was a choice I consciously made, it’s quite frustrating. Maybe this is more on me and not entirely the game’s fault, but I feel like there could have been a little more direction in the finale at the very least, not so much that it feels like I don’t have to figure anything out, but just a bit more of a nudge so I don’t unwittingly make a huge mistake.

I realize that a lot of my issues with Amnesia are based purely on it not living up to my expectations, but that’s just the experience I had with this game. But even if I attempt to view the experience through a lens divorced from those expectations, while I feel Amnesia is a strong experience, I still don’t think it’s a remarkable one. But looking back, there is truth in the notion that I built this game up in my head for years to be some kind of horror masterpiece, and naturally, it didn’t quite live up to those lofty expectations. But it’s still a very good horror experience and a very tense one for sure. “Terrifying” as opposed to “horrifying” is the word I would use to describe Amnesia. It’s not an experience that gets inside my head too much, but it’s still a worthy, atmospheric, and terrifying experience I quite enjoyed partaking in.

But there is also the matter of Amnesia’s free DLC add-on, Amnesia: Justine. Mechanically, it’s basically the same deal as the main game, and while I haven’t managed to finish it, I find its plot (which seems to be no more than tangentially connected to The Dark Descent) to be interesting. Essentially, you play as an unknown protagonist who wakes up in a prison cell and proceeds to be subjected to what seems to be a series of psychological experiments set up by the eponymous Justine, all while being hunted by some kind of creature (or maybe just a really messed-up human being, because it coherently talks). Why haven’t I managed to finish it yet, you ask? Well that is due to what is undoubtedly Justine’s most notable feature: perma-death. There’s no saving. You have one chance. Once the “monster” catches you, that’s it. After a fade to black and some creepy squelching sounds, the game simply boots you back to your desktop. This makes Justine an even tenser experience than The Dark Descent and an almost unbearably stressful one. If you do fail, you need to get back to where you were previously, and since the game remains the same each time you play it, this can be quite tedious and also obviously drains the tension out of the familiar bits. Predictably, the perma-death approach can also lead to frustration. I’ve attempted Justine three times now and all three times have died in the same area (for those that have played it: the flooded “Dungeon” area right after the Library), which seems to harbor a sudden and steep difficulty curve (and I might even go so far as to say it just feels cheap). My most frustrating death wasn’t the first one, but the second one, where the game seemed to glitch out somehow and put me in a seemingly unwinnable situation. That’s great; why bother wasting my time slogging through a game with perma-death again and again when it might just unexpectedly screw me over, at no fault of my own? I could probably succeed if I kept trying, but I simply just don’t have the energy to keep getting to my dying point just to try again; I know exactly what to do there at this point, but actually accomplishing it is a whole other story. There are a few aspects that make replaying Justine a bit more bearable though. For one, I hear the game in its entirety is fairly brief; an hour or so seems to be the average, though in my experience it took me longer than that just to get to where I keep dying. Also, the game’s different “levels” (at least up to the point I’ve reached) each involve a puzzle that doesn’t necessarily require solving in order to proceed with the game, so going back and trying again to figure these problems out (note: I still haven’t despite my best efforts) made my replays a bit less tiresome. All the same, maybe I’ll go back to it one day, but for now I’ve given up on Justine. It’s an interesting concept, but I’m really sick of the Amnesia experience right now and I have other games to play. And yes, I’ll admit that the game is just stressful as fuck to play and I’m tired of subjecting myself to it.

The Last of Us: Left Behind (Spoilers)

The Last of Us: Left Behind is a compelling and tragic companion to The Last of Us. It juxtaposes a glimpse at Ellie’s life as a (relatively) normal teenager with her future life as a hardened survivor adept at killing. The portion of Left Behind detailing what happens to Ellie shortly after Joel becomes incapacitated at the University of Eastern Colorado is just as tense and compelling as the core Last of Us experience, with some new twists thrown in such as having situations that mix human enemies with infected. It’s possible that this action-heavy side of Left Behind was added as an afterthought, in order to have some traditional action gameplay to break up the more relaxed and nonconventional Ellie and Riley sections, but it’s just as possible that having both was the plan all along because the two end up working really well together. The most interesting (and freshest) part of Left Behind, however, is  undoubtedly the side that details the last days of Ellie and her best friend, Riley’s relationship as they explore an abandoned shopping mall together. Here, we get a terrific and emotional piece of story-telling that not only gives more depth to Ellie’s character, but that is also just a commendable short story in its own right. Indeed, if The Last of Us proper did not exist and this part of Left Behind was completely standalone, it would be a fantastic and moving little vignette just on its own merits.

The mechanics of Left Behind are interesting because Ellie and Riley engage in nonviolent games together, like throwing bricks at cars and having a stealthy water gun fight, that are a playful mirror image of the brutal actions that Ellie performs in the future. Both sides of the game take place in a mall, so it’s very clear what the developers were going for and it’s very effective. Seeing Ellie as a (again, “relatively”) normal teenager hanging out with her best friend makes it all the more tragic how much of an efficient killer the world (and Joel) ends up making her. Most of the little scenes in Left Behind, like the two girls playing around with rubber Halloween masks and laughing about how people used to buy stuff like that, are charming in their own way, but two in particular stood out to me. The first is when Ellie and Riley ride the carousel. The whole process of walking over and getting on the carousel, Riley turning it on, Ellie riding it, and Riley joining in just before the machine stops being completely in-game and controlled by me made me reflect on how magical a video game experience can be. That may sound silly to you, but something about the perfectly-timed music, spinning the camera around to see Ellie’s excited facial expressions, and looking at the slowly spinning scenery as the carousel made its rotations perfectly put me in her shoes, strengthened my attachment to her as a character, and illustrated just how amazing something like this would be to a kid in a hellish world like The Last of Us’s. It struck a chord with me, and I teared up a little during the moment.

The second scene that stood out to me is the arcade one. At one point fairly early on in The Last of Us, Ellie and Joel happen upon a small record store with an arcade machine sitting in one corner of it. In an optional conversation, Ellie tells Joel that she played the game with her friend in the past and proceeds to describe it a bit. I was puzzled by this scene, because I questioned Ellie doing something as normal as playing a video game with a friend in the world that she was born into. Left Behind gives glorious context to that small throwaway conversation and it’s brilliant. Ellie and Riley come across that same arcade machine and seeing that it’s broken, Ellie expresses disappointment because she wanted to play the game. Riley casually tells her that “she can” and tells her to close her eyes. What follows is a surprisingly simple and brilliant sequence. The entire scene is just a close-up of Ellie’s face with her eyes closed. Riley starts describing the game and, Ellie’s hands on the arcade machine’s controls, she tries to imagine it. At first she is skeptical and so am I. But soon the borders of the screen begin to dim and I’m imagining Riley’s narrative of the game right along with Ellie. The imaginary game soon begins to bleed into reality as traditional fighting game health bars appear at the top of the screen and we begin to hear sound effects from the battle taking place in Ellie’s mind. As Riley describes each moment of the battle in detail, the player presses buttons according to prompts that appear on the screen. Whether you fail or succeed, the battle continues. Soon I’m wildly mashing buttons and by the end I’m totally into it. I want to win the imaginary fight just as much as Ellie. Similar to the carousel scene, this moment accomplishes so much with so little and simply and effectively puts me into Ellie’s shoes, making me feel like a kid playing a video game for the first time. It perfectly illustrates the importance of imagination and escapism, especially in a bleak world like Ellie and Riley’s. It also strengthens the bond between Ellie and Riley and demonstrates what a cool friend Riley is.

But Left Behind is also just a well-told teen romance. There’s no hamming it up and nothing feels forced or unnatural. This aspect of the game was unfortunately long spoiled for me, and I admit I was kind of waiting for it to happen, but the brief kiss shared between Ellie and Riley came at the perfect time and felt totally authentic. In that moment, when Ellie finally honestly told Riley “Don’t go” and Riley threw her firefly pendant to the ground, just for a second I desperately wanted the two to just stay together, keep having fun together and try to live the most normal life they can possibly have together in their broken world. I didn’t want Ellie to meet Joel and become his replacement daughter, or do all those horrible things later on down the road in the name of survival; I just wanted her and Riley to keep dancing in that department store. But, of course, this is The Last of Us, so that was never going to happen.

Thus the ending of Left Behind is truly tragic, in more ways than one. Even knowing that Ellie was immune, Left Behind’s short running time had effectively put me in the shoes of an Ellie before she knew that, and I had tears in my eyes seeing her anguish at being in such an unimaginably horrible situation with the friend she had just declared her love for. I saw the moment that Ellie describes to Joel in the final moments of The Last of Us play out in front of me, and the gut-wrenching tragedy of Ellie losing Riley and later so many others while she lived on came full circle. But thinking of those final moments of The Last of Us, and of the person Ellie became and where she found herself, the shattered tender moment shared with Riley in the mall becomes even more significant. In a moment of passion, Joel once berated Ellie for not knowing what loss is. Hardly.

BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea (PC) Thoughts

Spoiler Warning: I’ve tried to avoid major spoilers and don’t go into specific detail about any plot points, but you still might want to be wary of some vague spoilers here and there if you have not yet played this game, especially in the second paragraph.

An appropriate tagline for BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, the DLC follow-up to BioShock Infinite, might be “Irrational Games returns to what they do best”. They tried something similar but different with the sky-high action in the sunny city of Columbia, and while I’m glad BioShock’s successor took us to a new setting, I can’t deny that there’s nothing quite like the halls of the deep-sea city of Rapture. I love the opening section of Burial at Sea: Episode One because we get the rare chance to experience a small piece of a dystopian society when it was still a utopia. Stepping out of Booker’s office and exploring a Rapture that is bright, clean, and active with citizens who haven’t lost their minds is a treat, and I love the more open nature of this starting environment as well as the environments in Burial at Sea as a whole. Walking through the populated bars and shops of Rapture, with massive windows looking out on the city’s neon-lit skyscrapers (seascrapers?) made me reflect on how cool living in a city at the bottom of the ocean would be…before it all goes to hell, of course. The transition to shooting and violence also feels much more organic and less jarring than in Infinite proper, as Booker and Elizabeth are first attacked by the mad artist, Sander Cohen, and then sent on a one-way bathysphere trip to Frank Fontaine’s massive sunken department store turned prison, an incredibly hostile environment crawling with Splicers that resembles the Rapture we know and love from the original BioShock. This was a fairly smart way to have a game that takes place in Rapture before it fell and still have a first person shooter where you freeze people and shoot them with a shotgun. Exploring the derelict clothing departments of “Sub-Rapture”, feeling on edge every time a crazed Splicer lurking somewhere out of sight would ramble into my headphones, I felt a kind of tension that Infinite lacked. Perhaps it’s the closer quarters, or the often smaller groups of enemies, or the respawning enemies that kept me on edge, but something about the combat here just clicks with me more than in Infinite; it feels easier to manage but also more impactful somehow. It’s too bad Episode One seems to enjoy withholding resources such as plasmid-powering EVE and money from the player, because the episode’s short length means plasmids and weapons will mostly go without full upgrades and I felt like I was constantly running out of EVE and ammo in the middle of a fight, which limited my options in a brawl. I would have loved to have fully upgraded the Old Man Winter plasmid, which I had a blast combining with Bucking Bronco to freeze enemies in midair before they fell to the ground and shattered into icy bits. Also unfortunately: Episode One’s narrative starts out strong, but ends with a silly twist that only serves to muddle Infinite’s already muddled narrative even more. To be fair though, this is only part one of a two-part story…

Burial at Sea: Episode Two once again opens in a unique and interesting way, in a beautiful-looking and memorable sequence that is somehow simultaneously silly and inspiring. If there’s one thing Irrational seems to nail, it’s opening its games. Immediately after the opening, the narrative becomes even more messy and convoluted though. After making a shallow effort to explain the logic behind the twist at the end of Episode One, the story then throws an even more abstruse twist into the mix that feels like a contrived attempt to explain why Elizabeth can’t use her Tear powers anymore and that just raises more questions and injects more plot holes. Despite all this, once things got rolling I felt way more connected to Elizabeth as a playable character than I ever did to Booker (although I think much of me caring a lot about Elizabeth is owed to Courtnee Draper’s great voice performance as opposed to the game’s writing). I felt close to Elizabeth after playing Infinite and Episode One and cared about where her story went. By the end of Episode Two, however, Burial at Sea seems to be much more concerned with tying into the original BioShock in neat ways than delivering a satisfactory conclusion to Elizabeth’s story, which I found to be disrespectful to her character. While I think the tie-ins to the original are, as I said, neat, I wish the original BioShock had remained something separate and the links between it and Infinite had remained tenuous; instead, Burial at Sea ends up being a straight link to the original, shoving its overt connections in the player’s face and tying everything together in a neat bow. It’s an interquel, and ultimately little more than a prologue for the original game that overall cheapens Infinite as its own distinct entity and that doesn’t do justice to the character of Elizabeth, a character that I’ve been invested in this whole saga and whose ultimate fate basically amounts to being a catalyst for the events of the first game. It could’ve been worse and the story does do a fair job of linking Elizabeth’s story with the story of Jack and the Little Sisters, as well as overall connecting Infinite with the original, but I can’t help but feel Elizabeth as a character got cheated. I’m just a bit mixed on the whole affair; I’ll admit that having all the Irrational BioShock games being one big sealed up story does feel somewhat satisfying, but this overt link certainly wasn’t needed and I question whether or not it devalues the original, rather than adds to it.

Anyway, while the narrative  and the idea of Infinite, Burial at Sea, and the original BioShock all being one seamless, connected story is a point of contention for me, I actually quite like the other aspects of Episode Two’s design, even more than Episode One. Episode Two is a much lengthier and more complete and focused experience than Episode One, and makes that previous chapter feel like simply a warm-up. This time, the player finally takes on the playable role of Elizabeth, who has basically been the main character this whole story anyway (finally playing as her just feels right), and Episode Two places a large focus on stealth, on running and hiding and sneaking up on enemies. It accomplishes this in part by giving the player new plasmids and weapons, such the ability to turn invisible and see through walls and a crossbow equipped with tranquilizer darts and knockout gas, that encourage players to go about things in a quieter, and shockingly, non-lethal way. Players still have the ability to kill foes, but the game is principally designed around stealth and right from the outset, the narrative makes this clear (the more moral way of doing things is perhaps shoved a little too much in the player’s face early on). I’m disappointed that choosing to kill or not unfortunately doesn’t seem to have much significant impact on anything in the end, but I appreciate the new options and gameplay approach and like that the less violent combat choice suits Elizabeth, who isn’t a pathological killer like Booker. Stealthily creeping through huge environments crawling with Splicers, sneaking through vents, using sneak attacks and trying to use a limited amount of tranquilizer darts puts a whole new spin on the classic BioShock design and makes Episode Two feel like a whole new experience. Trying to survive with only the crossbow and non-lethal means, which is the way I played, also makes for a much more challenging and tense experience.  All this really pays off, as the game feels incredibly fresh, despite taking place in the familiar Rapture setting. I also love the environments in Episode Two, which feel varied and include a handful of creepy lab sections that focus on building atmosphere and story rather than combat, and quite frankly, I love that shit.

Overall, Burial at Sea is a mostly welcome return to Rapture, and despite my reservations about the narrative, I overall enjoyed it quite a lot, perhaps even more than Infinite proper. Episode Two is easily the star half of the package, not only because I’m a sucker for stealth games, but because of how well the stealth elements blend with the atmosphere and tenseness of the scenario. Elizabeth is alone, stranded without her reality-bending powers and with little to defend herself in a hellish deep-sea prison filled with ranting maniacs who will kill her on sight. She’s vulnerable, but also highly intelligent and extremely capable. All of this combined with Elizabeth’s heightened sense of humanity compared to Booker invested me in her character and the experience on a more serious level than anything in the Infinite saga prior, making me carefully consider every step I took and adding a sense of weight to the proceedings that flying around as Mr. DeWitt, sawing into people’s necks and electrocuting them until their heads popped off, before eating potato chips and chocolate bars off the floor seemed to lack (though some of that latter aspect is still present, admittedly). Episode Two also rarely felt repetitive and was never boring for me and some parts will probably stick out in my mind as notable moments in any game I’ve played, such as the unique opening and one late-game sequence that is notable for how uncomfortable it made me, which was definitely the intent.

As for my final thoughts on the whole “BioShock Infinite saga” as I’ve labeled it, having completed all of it now, I’ll say that it was an engaging ride, and one worth taking, but a flawed one. I think the original BioShock still stands on its own as a fantastic experience and while Infinite and Burial at Sea weren’t needed, they’re an…interesting follow-up. I admire the ambition of the developers, but the end result is a fun, engaging, pretty-looking, but messy experience. For more thoughts on BioShock Infinite proper, check out my previous post on the subject. The BioShock series as developed by Irrational Games is sealed up now, and it’s also sealed up when it comes to my capacity for it. Sure, 2K Games will likely continue to cash in on the series, and more stories could be told in a new city, or in Columbia or Rapture, but the narrative certainly doesn’t demand it and I most likely won’t be taking the trip if that day comes. Especially if it’s another trip to Rapture. Burial at Sea pretty much opened the lid on any remaining mysteries with the city, and its story feels told.

Hyrule Warriors Reminds Us Why DLC is a Bunch of Rubbish

The above video is a great example of why I think DLC is such anti-consumer rubbish. I paid $60 for Hyrule Warriors on its release day. I decided to buy the game new and not wait to get it used because not only did I want to play it and form an opinion on it as a Zelda fan (and play it as soon as I could to avoid having the experience spoiled), but I also genuinely wanted to support the game for several reasons (for being a quirky, experimental Zelda spin-off, being able to play as non-Link characters like Zelda, and a large cast of playable female characters).

But seeing this makes me regret that decision a little bit, and think that perhaps this game did not deserve my commerce.

The game itself is ok. I just posted a lengthy review on the topic, so I won't waste too many words talking about my feelings on the game here, except to reiterate that as much I enjoyed the title at certain points, Hyrule Warriors feels like it's missing a lot and is definitely far from the comprehensive Zelda tribute that I thought it would be. I'm never one who measures the worth of an experience by the quantifiable amount of stuff in it, but if I feel that an experience is lacking in certain respects, than it certainly can be not worth its full price for me, and I do feel that Hyrule Warriors is lacking. The core Zelda series has seventeen titles in it (including the two Four Swords games), but Hyrule Warriors only chose three Zelda games to focus on: Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. Most playable characters and several of the game's battlefields are derived from these games, as are two of the game's six boss monsters (three more are Zelda classics found in several games, and the remaining one is the final boss; although Dodongo actually has two models in the game, with one being based on his Ocarina of Time appearance). Playing as Zant and Ghirahim is great, but what about the other fourteen games, all of which are brimming with characters and unique worlds? Where's my journey to to Termina for a battle against the Skull Kid in Clock Town? How about some high seas pirate battles on the Great Sea? Or maybe we could shrink down for some Minish-sized battles? Can I play as Tingle? Marin? Malon? How about Veran and Onox who who fit in so well in this game (and easily could have replaced generics like Cia and Volga)? No? None of that? Ok...well I guess there's always a sequel.

But apparently Koei Tecmo and Nintendo had other plans besides a sequel before the game even launched in North America. No sooner did I get past the title screen of Hyrule Warriors on release day did I find a giant, obnoxious advertisement on the right side of the main menu for the "Hero of Hyrule" DLC pack, complete with the option to select it and be taken right to the eShop where I can apparently pre-order not one, not two, but four different DLC packs, all coming out within the next several months, all for the combined price of $20. You might be thinking that $20 for all this extra content is a good deal, except that, wait...didn't I just pay $60 for what I thought was a full, complete experience? And about that battle in Clock Town and those other characters like Skull Kid? Well, apparently there's a Majora's Mask pack on the way next year. Gee, I would've loved to have my personal favorite Zelda game already represented in the full-priced game I just bought.

It seems that Hyrule Warriors was hacked up into several different pieces, and the releases of its many pieces are being staggered over time and ensuring that the game's publishers are getting more and more of your money for content that should have been in the game to begin with. If the game wasn't quite finished, if they didn't have time to include this content in time for a launch, fine, it can be a free update later. But why do that when they can sell a mediocre $80 fan-service cash-in and get away with it? My $60 only got most of the Hyrule Warriors experience, but other key parts were cut up and are being sold separately.

I was already annoyed with all the obnoxious pre-order exclusives before the game's release. There was a bonus for every major video game retailer to get extra costumes. It's now more apparent than ever that Hyrule Warriors is (how did Yahtzee put it?) a giant "blatant marketing exercise" meant to get as much cash from Zelda and Nintendo fans as possible. And the first pack detailed in the video above is not even exciting or interesting DLC. $7.99 can get you: one new "weapon" (Epona is easily the only really compelling thing about this rip-off, but she should have been in the game to begin with), five new Legend Mode missions based on the generic non-Zelda characters that take place in the same maps that players of the game have already fought in hundreds of times, a new Adventure Mode map (which is also just another way to recycle the same content that's already in the game), and finally one new non-Zelda costume shared between, again, two of the non-Zelda characters. It also looks likes there's some lazy recolor costumes in there as well. Really? One lame costume, some lazy recolors, one new weapon, and some recycled content for nearly eight dollars? On the subject of costumes: multiple costumes are also something that should be in the full-priced game to begin with, especially re-colors. Just look at the new Super Smash Bros., that game isn't selling the Koopaling variants for Bowser Jr. separately or Little Mac's pink jogging outfit as DLC, and those are actual costumes. Hell, the Koopalings are more than just costumes, but wholly unique models. Just think about all the varied and unique content in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U on day one for the same price as Hyrule Warriors. Now, I might learn to eat my words in the future when Nintendo does announce costumes as part of a future DLC pack for Smash Bros. I'd certainly be lying if I said I was happy with the way that the newest Smash game was handled, spreading it across two different versions so one must buy both if they want to experience all the content the two games have to offer (as well as Mewtwo, so far as we know right now). But as far as I can tell, purchasing the Wii U version will basically net players the full experience, minus the Smash Run mode, some stages, and a lot of trophies (and again, Mewtwo...). Smash 3DS was obviously conceived as a way to get more money, even if it may be a worthy game in its own right and even if handheld Smash Bros. is neat. Despite all this, I still think my earlier point about costumes in Smash Bros. shines a glaring spotlight on how greedy and anti-consumer Hyrule Warriors' DLC is.

Let's look at it this way: if one wanted to get every single piece of content for Hyrule Warriors, they'd have to buy the game three separate times at GameStop, Best Buy, and Amazon for all the pre-order bonus costumes (although these apparently will also be available later for a price on the eShop from what I've heard), then register the game on Club Nintendo for two more bonus costumes, then buy all of the DLC packs, most of which aren't even out yet and all of which won't be until March of next year. That is ridiculous. This game is not worth all that money and trouble.

If you plan on buying or have already bought the DLC for Hyrule Warriors, I'm not going to berate you, but please give it some thought and try not to simply jump on it as soon as you see Epona. At the very least, please don't defend it. I'm tired of seeing people defending greedy bullshit like this, saying it's "reasonably priced" and "DLC done right". Besides the fact that content like Epona and costumes should be there at the $60 launch, the Master Quest pack isn't even exciting DLC. Other Nintendo series joining Mario Kart is exciting, I admit, but Epona and some lazy costumes, plus a bunch of non-Zelda content for a Zelda tribute is not. After playing Hyrule Warriors for around 50 hours and finishing the Legend Mode as well as a substantial chunk of the missions in Adventure Mode, I think I can confidently say that these new missions probably won't offer much new. I'm sure the future packs that actually have exciting Zelda content in them like the aforementioned Majora's Mask pack will be less offensive, but for the very nature of their existence, still pretty offensive.

As for "doing DLC right", something like the Mario Kart 8 DLC that comes out today (and the other MK8 Animal Crossing-themed pack that is slated for May 2015) isn't terrible I guess, but the only truly proper way to do DLC right is to make it free; an extra; a bonus for people who already paid for and own the game, but nothing necessary and nothing that requires another $20, especially not so soon after I just paid full price for the game, and especially when this content was clearly planned for the purpose of wringing more money out of people after the game's release.

GameStop-exclusive Ocarina of Time Link is disgusted by Hyrule Warriors' DLC