Journey: Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) - Review

Journey is a somewhat difficult game to classify, or even to describe. At the time of its release, I remember reading a handful of reviews all struggling to put into words what makes it such a good game, with their final recommendation only offering the promise that it is, in fact, a good game and that you should absolutely play it. "It's one of those games you just have to experience for yourself." Having now played the game myself, I can't elaborate on it much more than that, other than to say it's indeed a really good game.

Journey is what I guess you would classify an "art game" -- a short two or three hour game with simplistic gameplay meant to tell a metaphoric story through its use of visuals and music. Perhaps what's most impressive about Journey is that it's an art game where interactivity is crucial to the experience; it's an art game that gives the player goals and obstacles that require problem-solving and careful platforming and navigation to surmount. And the experience of making the journey from the outskirts of the desert all the way to the summit of the mountain truly is a beautiful one.

In terms of typical video game conventions, Journey is broken up into about a half-dozen self-contained levels, each with its own unique theme and gameplay mechanics. You begin on the outskirts of a vast desert with no other landmarks but a towering mountain lit by a beam of light off in the distance; moving towards it, you're introduced to the game's mechanics through short, simple tutorials before arriving at the proper start of the journey, an area that becomes your hub for subsequent playthroughs. Your goal in each level is to reach the statue at the end and progress to the next level, but along the way you can search for hidden glyphs that will help clue you into the game's backstory, as well as ancient symbols that will extend the length of your scarf.

Your scarf is your one tool for navigating the world. Scattered throughout this game's world are bits of red fabric that seem to have a life of their own; pressing the circle button near one will bring it back to life or call upon its powers to assist you. Using the X button will make you jump and fly through the air while depleting energy from your scarf, represented by the illuminated runes that run along its length. To recharge your scarf, you have to be near a source of red fabric, and having a longer scarf will let you jump/fly further/longer. As such, the length of your scarf becomes the most tangible symbol of your progression through the game and it provides a great sense of accomplishment to see it steadily grow the further you go.

Each of the levels provides a markedly different experience, both in terms of their atmospheres and their mechanics. In the first level you're faced with a ruined bridge and have to piece it back together with strands of red fabric; in the next level you're faced with a vast, empty desert and have to find your way to the mountain; in the next level you're sliding down a steep hill before arriving in the next level, the deep underground caverns with patrolling sentinel "dragons"; in the next level you're ascending a tower by jumping on platforms; in the final level you're ascending the snowy mountain, trying not to freeze to death or be blown off the side of the mountain.

So along the way, you're faced with a variety of situations that call for different types of actions on your part, making sure to keep the gameplay fresh and interesting from beginning to end. It's a short game meant to be completed in a single session, which feels very appropriate in order to keep the journey as poignant as possible -- it doesn't outstay its welcome or waste any time with repetition -- it's concise and to the point. Its simplicity is beautifully elegant, in fact; except for the two tutorial prompts showing you what buttons to press when and where, nothing else interferes with your suspension of disbelief. Everything you need to know about the game, from mechanics to objectives to threats are all subtly cued in a way that instinctively informs you without explicitly telling you.

That simple, non-intrusive design is critical in allowing you to soak yourself in the game's atmosphere and to feel a part of the journey, without feeling like you're playing a video game. The game itself is never challenging and the gameplay ultimately serves a bit of a perfunctory role of simply getting you through its roller coaster ride of scenery while giving you productive things to do. The gameplay does a fine job of making you feel a part of this world and attached to your character, but it's not really the game's emphasis -- it's the story and its atmosphere.

Simply put, Journey is a masterpiece in visual and musical design. Every moment is beautiful and has some sort of emotional salience, whether the game's depicting the crumbling remains of a ruined society, the foreboding and dangerous underground depths, or your own perilous struggles on the snowy mountain face. The scenic vistas are all breathtaking, and there's some pretty cool stuff going on in the underground sections that makes it feel like you're underwater with the way sun beams cut through wreckage far above to illuminate the red fabric sticking up into the sky like seaweed. I was so stricken with its artistry that I had to sit and just admire it for a few moments.

The music, meanwhile, is fantastic to listen to on its own but it works so well in establishing the tone of each sequence in the game. Parts of it are genuinely haunting, with ambient tones droning on and on with string and flute lines playing a somber melody, reflecting the vast expanses of the world around you and its complete desolation. Parts of it are thrilling and whimsical as you race downhill. Other parts use crescendoing, dissonant chords and heavy drums to create thick tension when your character is struggling, and the penultimate song of the soundtrack builds itself up so well to capture the grandiose feeling of reaching your goal at the end that it perfectly encapsulates the epicness of your journey.

Put together, the visuals and the music are the best treat the game has to offer, and it's an absolutely exceptional one. The journey basically is just seeing the sights, hearing the music, and feeling how it relates to your own progression from the outskirts of the desert to the summit, or passing your trials and accomplishing your goals. The simple game mechanics combined with the beautiful aesthetics do a wonderful job of instilling genuine feelings of wonder, dread, accomplishment, struggle, and eventually success in the player. As I said earlier, it's an emotional experience, and it's especially impressive how much emotion they're able to put into the game without any sort of dialogue or other characters.

A large part of what makes Journey truly special, though, is the way it implements cooperative gameplay. As long as you're online and signed into the PlayStation Network, you'll automatically be joined with another player to share the journey together. It's completely anonymous -- you don't find out who they are until finishing the journey, when the game shows the names of players you met along the way -- and you have virtually no way of communicating with them except through your movements and by pressing the circle button to make the chiming noise you use on the red fabric.

It's fun trying to use the game's limited options to communicate your thoughts while trying to interpret what the other player is thinking, and it's such a great feeling when you get yourself synchronized with another player and really work together. It's amazing, really, how attached you can become to another player without ever exchanging words, simply by finding creative ways to interact and by sharing the journey together. It was great the first time I realized that touching another player recharged our scarves, and that by emitting the loud chirps while in mid-air we could replenish our scarves and continue flying indefinitely. I felt a strong sense of camaraderie with certain players and was almost disappointed to part ways at the end. I still go back into the game from time to time just to meet up with new players.

At the same time, however, I'm not sure I'd recommend playing Journey online the first time through. When I first started playing I didn't even realize the game was cooperative until another person who looked just like me showed up. I then realized it was another player, but that person just wanted to move ahead in the game and made me self-conscious about stopping to smell the roses or exploring hidden areas for ancient signs. After he basically completed the first level all on his own while I was exploring around, I realized I would be deprived of many of the discoveries and decided to go offline.

After completing the game for the first time, I went back online and did a runthrough to see what cooperative play was like. I ended up paired with a guy in a white cloak -- a symbol that he'd unlocked every single ancient sign -- and he led me through the whole game, showing me every little thing I'd missed and getting me trophies that I'd missed or didn't even know about. He was extremely nice and helpful, and when it came time for the very end of the game he started drawing little hearts in the snow, to which I responded by drawing a janky-looking smiley face. That was a fun experience, but if that had been my first time I would've been so incredibly bored not being able to discover anything for myself.

If you're playing for the first time with another new player, that has the potential to be a great experience as the two of you learn the mechanics and work your way through the journey together, but there's a lot of potential as well to be matched with someone who's just going after a certain trophy or whose playstyle is vastly different than yours which might ruin the experience for a first time player.

That's about all I can say about Journey. It actually feels kind of like a cross between Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, except without Yorda and without the colossi, which should tell you a lot about how good it is or how remarkable the game feels to play. Journey is a very unique experience, and what makes it so special is that your own journey is entirely personal. To me, the game felt a bit like a metaphor for life, but everything is open to interpretation and everyone will have a slightly different experience. Figuring out what the game means to you is part of the journey, and it's a beautiful journey at every step along the way.

A Link to the Past Between Worlds - Review

A Link to the Past is one of my favorite Zelda games (second only to Majora's Mask), so it should seem only natural that I'd be excited to return to the Hyrule I spent so much time in as a kid. But when Nintendo first announced The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, their quasi-sequel to ALTTP set in the same world and featuring the same top-down gameplay, I was a little skeptical. It seemed to me like it had the potential to be just a cheap, gimmicky, nostalgia-based cash grab that might even put the legacy of the original game to shame.

Imagine my surprise when A Link Between Worlds turned out to be one of the best Zelda games I've played in the past decade.

With the exception of Link's Awakening, I've had a difficult time getting into any of the handheld Zelda games. I've played each and every one of them, but always got bored, lost interest, and stalled out before ever completing them. I basically stopped considering them part of the main series and stopped caring. A Link Between Worlds is the first handheld Zelda game I've actually finished since Link's Awakening, which says a lot in and of itself, but even compared to the console games, it's the most fun I've had playing a Zelda game since Majora's Mask.

The first thing that must be said about ALBW is that it's deliberately meant to be a nostalgia trip for fans of the series. The most obvious, of course, is how basically everything from ALTTP is referenced in the new game -- the title screen even plays the same music and animation that opened ALTTP. But besides that, you see numerous other references to other Zelda games; paintings on walls of Makar and Link's pajamas from Wind Waker, Majora's Mask on Link's wall, Dampe the gravekeeper from Ocarina of Time, the Chamber of the Sages platform from OOT, house music from OOT, the three pendants all have the icons from Oracle of Ages, as well as countless other smaller images and bits of dialogue. 

It's kind of weird, actually, how much of ALBW's imagery and lore seems retroactively inspired by OOT, considering that OOT was basically an adaptation of ALTTP. Not that it matters, but it's interesting to note the circularity of these games' development.

With A Link Between Worlds, a large part of its appeal is simply returning to the Hyrule established in A Link to the Past. We've all replayed some of our favorite games hoping to relive childhood memories; playing ALBW is just like that, with the thrill of visiting that same world again and recognizing familiar landscapes, except brought to life once again with fresh visuals and various gameplay upgrades, all while retaining the same look and feel of the original. At the same time, there's a ton of new content and certain areas (such as the interiors of dungeons) are a little different, allowing you to take the stroll down memory lane while still being treated to fresh, new sights.

Link's house in the dark world.

In terms of the story, ALBW is not that great, at least not at the start. It's basically a carbon copy of the story from ALTTP, which was repeated almost verbatim in OOT, except featuring a sorcerer named Yuga instead of Aghanim. Both kidnap the princess Zelda and attempt to resurrect Ganon, requiring Link to acquire three special items in order to claim the Master Sword before mounting an attack on the castle and being transported to an alternate world where has to rescue seven people before facing Ganon in the alternate world.

The story is not that original, but it doesn't really need to be, especially since it's deliberately trying to recreate that feeling of playing ALTTP. Zelda games have been recycling the same basic story premises ever since the original, so it should come as no surprise here. I'll admit I was a little disappointed when I realized it was just the same damn thing all over again, but once I got into the gameplay I really didn't care. That said, the story picks up a bit at the end with a few unique, somewhat unexpected twists that helped make the overall experience still feel fresh and original, while still channeling the original spirit of ALTTP.

The only real downside to ALBW's story is that its main antagonist, Yuga, is about as flat as the portraits he paints. Granted, Aghanim was pretty bland and uninteresting, but in the 20+ years since ALTTP and all the various incarnations of this series' canon story, any time Nintendo introduces a new villain is a great opportunity to spice things up, and Yuga comes off feeling like another missed opportunity. Years down the road I won't have any fond memories of Yuga and probably won't even be able to remember his name. It would've been nice to see him a little bit more involved in the story to make him more unique or at least more memorable than his role as "generic, obligatory plot device."

Mechanically, ALBW is virtually identical to ALTTP, except with a few modernizations on the classic formula. A Link Between Worlds has now added a dedicated button for blocking with your shield, which functions as a toggle and locks Link facing in his current direction, making his shield much more useful than in ALTTP. You can now also fire arrows and the hookshot in diagonal directions, making it much easier to hit your intended targets. Using the plus pad, you can pan the camera to see areas further off-screen. Otherwise, the controls and perspectives are all the same and the formula of going into dungeons to solve puzzles, collect keys, and to defeat a boss before collecting a heart container all remains the same.

Merging with a wall as a painting to fit between the bars.

The unique gameplay mechanic in ALBW is Link's newfound ability to turn himself into a two-dimensional painting, merging himself onto the flat space of walls to navigate through small crevices and around platform-less walls. The idea doesn't seem all that worthwhile at first, but it gets used in some interesting ways throughout the game, such as merging with a wall to avoid damage from an oncoming obstacle, emerging from behind a tight space to knock something else off the wall, and primarily, navigating moving platforms. What had me appreciating this mechanic most of all is how it promotes exploration, with lots of ledges and hidden areas requiring you to take clever advantage of the portrait mode to see or reach areas you ordinarily wouldn't.

It's also fun just to see the perspective shifts when merging into a wall, of going from the top-down angle to the head-on side angle in portrait mode. Some of the puzzles rely specifically on taking advantage of this change in perspective to find hidden areas. But what disappoints me about this portrait mode is how the game waits until the absolute final boss battle to introduce any kind of extra actions that can be performed while in portrait mode -- throughout the whole game you just use it to do the same basic things over and over again with a handful of novel twists in specific dungeons, but there's no real evolution in the gameplay until the final moments. That made the final boss fight dramatically more interesting, but it felt a little too late to be introducing one of the more interesting mechanics in the game.

The other unique twist on gameplay is the inclusion of a merchant named Ravio who rents out all of Link's staple items like the bow, bombs, boomerang, hookshot, and so on. This merchant is available right after you finish the introduction sequence and his entire stock (minus the Sand Rod) is available essentially from the very beginning of the game. With Ravio, you can spend 50 rupees to rent each items indefinitely on the condition that if you fall in battle, he reclaims the items and you have to rent them out again. Alternatively, if you save up enough rupees (800-1200) you can permanently buy each item from him.

Ravio's shop set up in Link's house.

I was very skeptical of this renting system at first; after all, it's long been customary to acquire each new item from a dungeon and use the new item to defeat the dungeon's boss. Getting a fancy new item was a large part of the fun in venturing into a new dungeon, and I worried that having access to all of Link's main tools from the start of the game would detract from the sense of discovery along the way. As I discovered, this renting system is one of the very reasons that ALBW was such a compelling experience for me.

Ever since Ocarina of Time, the Zelda games adopted a gameplay strategy of forced linearity in a simulated open world. At the start of each game you're presented with big, open spaces and the promise of an entire world at your fingertips to explore, but then you're forced down the game's pre-determined path since everywhere is blocked by arbitrary "lock and key puzzles" preventing you from going anywhere but along the path of the main questline. You can't visit Death Mountain until you get the letter from Zelda; you can't visit Zora's Domain until you get the bombs from Death Mountain; and so on. You're expected to do things in a certain order and have no choice but to be dragged by the nose along the game's intended path.

With ALBW, you're given a completely open world to explore with all of the tools necessary to explore it, right from the very beginning of the game. Just as the original Legend of Zelda established, ALBW is all about exploration and having the freedom to discover things on your own, to sequence-break and to complete dungeons in whatever order you want. There are no obnoxious companion characters telling you every little thing to do at every step of the way and there are relatively few restrictions on what you can do at any time in the game. It's all about your own agency, figuring things out for yourself and carving your own way through the game's world and story, and that's such a refreshing feature that's been lacking in the series for a long time.

Cutting down shrubs to collect rupees. Classic.

With all of Link's main tools being available from Ravio's shop, I was worried that clearing out dungeons would feel less rewarding, but there are still good rewards to be found within dungeons which makes thorough exploration still very much worthwhile. Instead of finding a new piece of equipment within dungeons, you now find various types of upgrades that improve your performance -- the Hylian shield that lets you block magic attacks, an enhanced magic meter, Master Ore for tempering the Master Sword, blue and red tunics for taking reduced damage, the upgraded power glove for lifting large boulders, and so on.

Outside of the dungeons, you still need to explore and complete various tasks to acquire the rest of Link's equipment. A shield must be purchased from a shop in town; the flippers that allow you to swim have to be obtained from the zora; the power glove that lets you pick up rocks has to be obtained from the ore miner; the pegasus boots can be obtained from the fast thief in town; bottles can be earned from various locations. These things are all required at various points in the game, but the game doesn't tell you explicitly when or where; it's all up to you to discover things and put two-and-two together on your own. With the constant presence of valuable mini-games, heart pieces, treasure hunting challenges, NPCs, and equipment to find, there's always something worthwhile to discover.

Besides actual equipment, ALBW also features a gold skulltula-esque 100-item collect-a-thon in the form of Mother Maiamai and her 100 lost children. Scattered throughout the light and dark overworlds are hidden octopus-like hermit crabs, requiring careful observation and the correct items to collect. For every 10 of these that you find, you can permanently upgrade one of your purchased items from Ravio, such as making the bow shoot three arrows at once in a narrow wedge pattern, or increasing the bomb's blast radius. As compared to the gold skulltula rewards, it's actually worthwhile to collect the Maiamai babies and further contributes to that feeling of growth and progression as you work your way through the game.

The octorok baseball mini-game.

Ravio's equipment also features the return of the magic meter, with every one of his items using a portion of your mana supply with each and every use. Throwing the boomerang uses only a small amount, but dropping a bomb uses a larger portion. The meter slowly regenerates after a few seconds of inactivity. At first I thought it was kind of lame that firing the bow no longer used consumable arrows, but I'd been missing the magic meter ever since its disappearance in Twilight Princess and was glad to have it back. The magic meter still limits how much you can use your items, but the auto-regen helps mitigate time spent cutting grass or smashing pots looking for arrows or bombs, so it's an all-around a nice feature.

The main complaint I have ALBW is that its "dark world," named Lorule this time around, is not quite as interesting as the dark world from ALTTP. The premise is that Lorule is a fully alternate version of Hyrule that's being physically ripped apart since its ancestors decided to destroy their own Triforce to prevent war over its possession. Princess Hilda (the alternate version of Zelda) asks you to help save her realm, and so you travel between the two worlds via tiny fissures in the walls of Hyrule and vice versa. As a consequence of the devastation, areas within Lorule are often detached from one another and completely isolated, requiring that you return to Hyrule in search of a fissure elsewhere in the world to access the uncharted areas of Lorule.

One of the fissures in the dark world.

My issue with this system is that it detracts from Lorule's sense of presence when it doesn't exist as a persistent landscape; it feels like less of an actual world because it's so disjointed, instead feeling like isolated zones dedicated to each of the seven main dungeons. Furthermore, with fixed points for traversing between the two worlds, you lose the unique gameplay mechanic from ALTTP of using the Magic Mirror to switch between worlds wherever you stand. It was a lot of fun to observe the similarities and differences between the two worlds, to find a suspicious arrangement of rocks in one and to position yourself so that when you used the Magic Mirror, you'd reach an inaccessible spot in the other world. That whole element is completely missing in ALBW, and it's a little disappointing feeling so restricted in that regard.

The dungeons also don't feel as involved or as complex as dungeons from past Zelda games. For whatever reason, they feel a bit smaller than I'm used to seeing, and it was a bit surprising how quickly I worked my way through the seven dungeons of the dark world -- a task that I remember taking much more time in ALTTP (granted, that may have been entirely because I was a kid at the time). Either way, the dungeons do a serviceable job of implementing the usual tropes and mechanics we've come to expect, and a few even have some unique gimmicks going on which keeps them interesting enough even in their relative simplicity.

A Link Between Worlds feels like a classic Zelda game to me in terms of its openness and its emphasis on player-driven exploration and discovery. Those are qualities that have been lacking in the series for a long time and it felt great to finally be given that kind of freedom once again. It was also a pure nostalgia treat to return to the Hyrule of A Link to the Past, seeing all of its familiar locales done up in fresh new visuals with all the other changes as well. It's the most fun I've had playing a Zelda game since Majora's Mask, and if you don't own a 3DS, it's almost worth the cost just to play A Link Between Worlds.

With all of the effort Nintendo has put into the likes of remaking Ocarina of Time with "Master Quest" dungeons and creating the quasi A Link to the Past sequel, it makes me really crave some kind of similar treatment to Majora's Mask. You hear me Nintendo? Make it happen.

The Last of Us: It's Pretty Good, But ...

Whenever a critically-hyped mainstream game receives nothing but unanimous praise from professional critics and ordinary gamers alike, I tend to become somewhat skeptical. It seems like more often than not, I tend to disagree with the masses; I've been burned too many times by games that just don't live up to their hype and end up disappointing me. On occasion, however, the masses are actually right and I'm left with no choice but to agree with them. Such is the case with The Last of Us, Naughty Dog's latest foray on the PS3 -- a post-apocalyptic survival game starring two characters, Joel and Ellie, trying to make it across the country with a cure to the fungal virus afflicting mankind.

I enjoyed The Last of Us. It's a pretty good game that understands how tension and survival mechanics are supposed to work in these types of games, and its story is genuinely interesting to see through to its conclusion. More appropriately, its characters are worth seeing through to the end. Joel and Ellie's journey is a very riveting one that kept me playing for long stretches at a time, not wanting to put it down. But for as good as The Last of Us is, it's also an imperfect game -- one that really irritated me at times, and which still isn't as good as it could have been.

Modern survival-horror games could stand to take a few lessons from The Last of Us. Despite not being a survival-horror game, The Last of Us features many of the same mechanics that would be appropriate for such a game -- notably, its emphasis on the actual survival component. While many recent survival-horror games have turned into mindless action games with tepid horror atmospheres, The Last of Us is as close to a true survival game as we've had in a long time, and that's such a refreshing feeling. This is a game where taking on three enemies at once is a challenge, and where facing five enemies seems almost impossible.

The skills upgrade window, requiring collectible supplements.

A large part of what makes The Last of Us such a successful survival game is its crafting system and the scarcity of resources. Healing items, ammunition, and weapons are extremely rare, requiring you to scavenge the environment in search of resources to craft these valuable items. In hard mode, at least, these resources are pretty hard to come by, which means any time you engage in combat, you have to weigh the costs versus the benefits -- do you spend your precious few bullets killing enemies from a safe range so you can preserve your healing kits, or do you try to go in for melee kills to save your bullets, but risk taking more damage? Do you even engage in combat at all, or do you try to sneak past your enemies?

The system encourages exploration, both during the calm downtime between encounters and during encounters themselves. You might be tempted to sneak past everyone and everything to avoid the risk of losing anything, but you also miss out on lots of valuable resources in the process, making you weigh the risks versus the rewards -- is it worth it to try exploring every room in this area, on the chance that I'll find some sweet loot? Every stage of the game requires you to make smart decisions in terms of how you manage your resources and how you decide to go about certain encounters, meaning the game rewards you for smart decisions and careful execution and punishes you for recklessness.

Combat is slow and methodical, but loaded to the brim with tension and just the right amount of thrilling action, which feels very appropriate for this type of game. With the scarcity of resources, getting through a fight is not just about surviving -- it's about surviving efficiently, getting through the fight while consuming the least amount of resources. The game is fairly open-ended in terms of letting you decide how you want to approach situations, either through pacifistic non-combat, stealth take-downs, run-and-gun action, or any combination thereof. Like the exploration, it encourages you to make smart decisions, and the constant risk and tension of combat makes it incredibly thrilling to narrowly escape by the skin of your teeth, or satisfying to come away with a flawless execution.

Your head a'splode.

Enemies are pretty smart and react intelligently to your actions; pull a gun on them and they'll take cover, kill enough of their allies and they'll run and hide. With all the different options available to you, both in terms of your own arsenal and the ever-complex level design, encounters can end up being extremely dynamic. You can go into a fight, die, reload the save, and have the encounter play out very differently, either because of your dynamic change in strategy or because the enemies behave a little differently. Combined with the constant addition of new types of weaponry, new types of enemies, and different scripted scenarios, the combat rarely ever gets to feel repetitive. 

Stealth in The Last of Us is some of the best I've seen in a mainstream game like this. There's no overt stealth system requiring you to press a button to go into cover behind an obstacles and nothing measuring your visibility or anything like that -- it's all very natural and intuitive. If you want to stay hidden, you crouch low and just stay behind cover. When you approach cover, Joel will put his hand on it, cuing you that you're softly glued to that surface, and whenever you're ready to change locations you move away from it or vault over it. It's simple, it's elegant, and the level design gives you a lot of ways to plan a stealthy approach or escape.

The actual story is not all that complicated -- it's mostly a series of "we have to get from point A to point B" for various reasons, but the interactions between characters along the way are what make it such an engaging experience. Joel and Ellie and very well-written and well-acted characters that feel much more genuine than most video game characters. There are a lot of small moments between them, dialogues here and there, that are obviously scripted well in advance, but they come off feeling spontaneous and natural. Along the way, Joel and Ellie meet various other characters for brief amounts of time who add to the characterization of this post-apocalyptic world, offering different insights to how other survivors have fared and offering varying contrasts and conflicts for the two heroes.

Joel and Ellie, out exploring.

More than anything, The Last of Us has its pacing and momentum perfectly balanced. Gameplay flows smoothly, alternating slower-paced exploration, character development sequences, narrative cutscenes, and tense action/stealth sequences, such that you rarely get tired feeling like you're doing the same thing. Everything flows seamlessly into the next with constant objectives and threats demanding your immediate reaction. The pacing is so riveting that I'd play for three or four hours at a time and not even realize it, and then still want to continue playing even though I needed to get to sleep soon.

All of the game's core elements, then, are very good. The Last of Us is a well-realized game that deserves every bit of its praise, but there are some things in its design that absolutely piss me off and which hold it back from perfection.

Chief on my list of complaints is how often the game is apt to break its own rules, leaving the player to fail an encounter numerous times as he tries to deduce the idiosyncratic logic behind that encounter's mechanics. For example, you spend several hours familiarizing yourself with the stealth system -- how it works, how to take advantage of it -- and the game makes it clear that stealth, running away, and avoiding combat are always valid options for an encounter. After you've figured this out, you run into a scenario where you have to infiltrate a school and stealth seems like the most logical choice -- the characters even stress this -- but there comes a time in this encounter that enemies are forcibly scripted to detect you, no matter how careful and stealthy you are, from impossible distances, causing everything to swarm on you, simply to force a frantic fight-or-flight kind of situation on the player. 

I had to die a few times to realize that it was no fault of my own that they were detecting me, and that it was the developers forcing their hand on the storytelling. But even then, the game had already long established that you can just run away from an encounter if absolutely necessary -- the characters even yell to run when you hit that scripted threshold -- so after several attempts desperately trying to run past the encounter to reach the next "checkpoint," I learned that that option is suddenly not available to me and I have to kill every enemy in the area to progress. It was just so damn frustrating trying to do what the game has explicitly told me is a viable option and which seems totally appropriate for this situation, only to have that option inexplicably taken away from me.

Using Joel's listening ability to "hear" enemies through walls.

Later on, I escaped a hotel and was faced with an open area crawling with patrolling human enemies. Joel hands Ellie a bolt-action rifle and tells her to use it if he gets into trouble down there clearing a path. After I'd slowly and methodically picked off every guard from stealth, more spawned literally from out of nowhere -- behind corners I had just cleared moments ago -- patrolling the area aggressively with their weapons drawn, as if to force me into a desperate high-action combat scenario just to fulfill the story requirement of Ellie using the rifle to save me. It was supposed to a development in her character and the relationship between Joel and Ellie coming to trust and rely upon one another, and there was apparently no way for Naughty Dog to get that point across without punishing me for my diligent effort and forcing me into an arbitrarily bullshit combat situation.

At other times, the game blatantly seems to defy logic, just for the sake of its mechanics and its storytelling. While exploring a suburban neighborhood, the characters come to a dead end and have to crawl through a doggie door instead of just climbing over an easily scale-able wooden privacy fence. While escaping from the school, they end up in a gymnasium, forced to climb up onto the retracted bleachers to escape out the window -- naturally, enemies spawn once I'm the last one left to go up, and instead of just taking the few seconds to pull me up, the game forces you to stay on the ground level and fend off an entire wave of enemies, just for the thrill of it. Then you get attacked by an entire group of guys with guns and you take them out before they even fire a shot, and they don't drop their weapons or any sort of ammunition just to force you to scrape by with minimal resources.

The bulk of the game is also detrimentally linear. When crafting a strong narrative-driven game, linearity is of course to be expected -- I'm not saying I need a sprawling open world or anything, but some more open spaces to explore, besides cramped, narrow corridors, would have been nice. The game is at its best when it places you in open spaces that can be explored at your leisure, while still funneling you down a linear path, but these areas are always broken up by long stretches of glorified corridor-crawling. It would have been really nice to have more open areas like the hotel, or the possibility of branching paths that re-converge on the main path of the developer's story line.

Joel and Tess infiltrating a wharf.

Throughout the course of the game, they change up the pacing by having you settle down into calm environments, exploring and solving environmental puzzles to advance to the next area -- there's a lot of potential for great gameplay within these elements, but the environmental puzzles are all the same lame, repeated affairs throughout the entire game. Ellie can't swim, so at numerous points in the game you're forced to take Joel swimming through an area to find a wooden shipping pallet, return to Ellie, and use it to float her over to the next area. Otherwise, you're looking for a ladder somewhere to climb up to a high ledge or you're looking for a wooden plank to walk across a gap -- it's literally the same damn stuff over and over again, and it would've been nice to have seen more variety in this part of the game's design, and/or some more puzzles that required some actual thought to solve.

The stealth system is fairly sophisticated, but it still falls victim to feeling exceedingly cheap and unfair at times. It's the classic case of spending seemingly forever studying patrol routes, hiding, waiting, and biding your time for the perfect take-down, only for the enemy to turn at the last possible second and put everyone into full alert. Then you have issues where the "grab" prompt doesn't pop up (the thing that allows you to perform the take-down) when it obviously should, or enemies seeing or hearing you when they realistically should not be able to, or having your cover blown because you couldn't vault over an obstacle that looked exactly like it was designed to be vaulted over, and so on. The system is generally good, but moments like these recurred throughout the entire game and managed to piss me off consistently.

Finally, there's the game's airlock checkpoint save system that prevents any sort of backtracking into previous areas -- you finish an encounter or open a door, and then you're stuck watching a cutscene as the game advances completely beyond your control. I absolutely hate it when games do this, and it was especially infuriating in this game how many times I inadvertently picked the "correct" path to advance the story and was forcibly prevented from exploring a side room or a small, alternate path. Considering how much of a role exploring for resources plays in this game as well as how much of a completionist I am when it comes to exploration, I felt like I was cheated out of game content that I had every intention to experience.

For as many complaints as I have, these are generally nitpicking blemishes. The inconsistency in how the game handles its own rules, the repetition of environmental puzzles, and extreme linearity are all legitimate problems that detract from the game's excellence, but The Last of Us is still one of the best games I played in 2013 and one of the best games on the PS3.

Nintendo 3DS impressions

When the 3DS was first announced in 2010, I was kind of indifferent. I owned the original Nintendo DS and enjoyed it at the time, but steadily lost interest in its games and all of its size/hardware variants (DS Lite, DSi, DSi XL, etc). Mobile gaming stopped appealing to me in general, and it's been about seven years since I've given it a fair chance. It started in September when I bought a PlayStation Vita, and now after Christmas I also own a blue 3DS XL. I've been playing it for a little while, so here are my initial thoughts and impressions on it.

The first thing that struck me with the 3DS XL is that it feels much more comfortable and ergonomic than the original 3DS model. Having played the original model briefly in stores and at a friend's place, I found its angular edges, rectangular shape, and somewhat small size a bit awkward to hold. With the 3DS XL, the edges and corners are more rounded, and its larger size makes it fit more comfortably in my hands, making it feel all-around much nicer to hold.

However, I still find the 3DS XL much less comfortable than the PlayStation Vita. That's mostly a testament to the Vita's superior, well-rounded design, with the edges and shoulder buttons allowing the hands to wrap around it quite naturally, and its overall thickness is nearly twice the size of the bottom half of the 3DS XL (the part that you actually hold). With the 3DS XL, I still find its blocky design awkward to hold, in particular how it has to be held to reach the shoulder buttons, and its flat backside and thin profile has me clutching the device awkwardly in my fingers, instead of resting comfortably in my palms. After playing for an hour or two, my hands started to cramp slightly.

In terms of the hardware interface, the 3DS' slide pad does a fairly adequate job of simulating a three-dimensional joystick -- certainly much better than the crummy slide pad on the original PSP. It has a nice grippy feeling to it, and the concave indentation allows your thumb to stay securely on it. It does not, however, feel as good as the Vita's actual joysticks, and with the increased real estate of the 3DS XL, it makes you wonder why they didn't try to fit a second slide pad on the right side of the device. Considering Nintendo "solved" the problem on the original 3DS with that weird-looking add-on attachment, it seems silly that they'd resort to the same trick for their newer, improved 3DS model.

The rest of the hardware obviously pales in comparison to the likes of the PlayStation Vita -- the GPU, CPU, and RAM are all substantially less powerful than the Vita's leading to much less graphically impressive performance, and the lower screen resolution (stretched out over a larger space on the 3DS XL) is especially underwhelming. When you can look at the screen and count the pixels, it's a bit disappointing. It's equally underwhelming how relatively useless the bottom screen actually is in gameplay, at least with the games I've played thus far. The operating system on the 3DS is adequate, but doesn't feel as modern or as streamlined as the Vita's smartphone-inspired design.

I used to think the whole 3D craze a dumb, pointless gimmick, but having spent some time with the 3DS, I now realize that it really does enhance the visual experience. It has virtually no effect on actual gameplay and still ultimately amounts to a superficial gimmick, but on the small screen of the 3DS it's quite nice. I usually find myself playing with the 3D slider turned all the way up just because it makes the visuals "pop" more (figuratively, literally). In terms of practical benefits, I find it does help for gauging depth -- ever since 3D rendering became prevalent in gaming, you still had to rely on things like shadows and changing camera angles to sort of estimate distance, but seeing the actual 3D helps tremendously with that.

The 3DS has some other unique features that, to me, feel like truly pointless gimmicks. The key feature in this category is StreetPass -- a sort of social networking system that gives you in-game items and benefits whenever you pass someone on the street who's also carrying a 3DS. The problem I have with this feature is primarily that it requires you to keep your device turned on (in sleep mode) with the wireless on to get any kind of benefit, which makes me worry about preserving battery life. That and the fact that I don't generally take my 3DS out of the house. I don't think I'll be getting much use out of StreetPass, but the actual benefits aren't enticing enough for me to try it.

So far, I've preferred the Vita to the 3DS, just in terms of build design and hardware, but where the 3DS makes its mark is in its games library. Whereas the Vita has had a slow trickle of games since its launch in 2012, the 3DS has had a much more constant flow of new games. Couple this with the 3DS' backwards compatibility with original DS games, and you have a much more expansive library at your disposal. But this is still a much closer comparison than you might actually think, because the two devices offer somewhat different styles of games, and it mostly comes down to preference.

With the Vita, you get a console-quality gaming experience on the go, with staple console franchises like Uncharted, Killzone, Assassin's Creed, LittleBigPlanet, and Metal Gear Solid, as well as original IPs like Gravity Rush and Tearaway. Whereas the Vita strives for console-quality gaming, the 3DS strives instead for quality mobile-gaming -- games that aren't as technically impressive but which work really well for casual, short stints. At first, I didn't think the 3DS' library was all that appealing, but now I realize its games satisfy a whole different desire and I'm having more fun than I thought I would with "casual" Nintendo games.

That said, I still don't see the appeal in the staple franchises that have been selling DSs and 3DSs for all these years, like Pokemon, Professor Layton, Phoenix Wright, Animal Crossing, Scribblenauts, Kingdom Hearts, etc. These are the games I usually see people recommending whenever anyone talks about the 3DS, and yet I just have zero interest in these games. Thus far I've bought Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, and Resident Evil: Revelations. These are all games I look forward to playing (I've already finished Super Mario 3D Land and was a impressed, but ultimately underwhelmed by it), and in a few days when I travel across the country, I'll probably bring my 3DS with me instead of the my Vita just to play some of these games.

So, the 3DS itself doesn't impress me very much. I find it kind of uncomfortable to hold, it's technically inferior to the Vita, and many of its most high-profile, device-selling series just don't interest me. But the 3DS has a much bigger library of games to choose from, and the 3D effect is pretty cool. If you could somehow blend the two, we'd have the perfect system. As it stands, I prefer the Vita, but find some of the games on the 3DS too alluring to pass up.

Super Mario 3D Land, aka "Super Easy 3D Land"

It's been a while since I've played a true Mario game in its entirety. I've dabbled briefly with New Super Mario Bros on the Wii, as well as Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U, but for whatever reason Super Mario 64 is the last Mario game I've actually played from beginning to end. And what a great game that was. Other than that, the only Mario games I've played since the days of the Nintendo 64 are the spinoffs -- Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario Golf, and so on.

I'm a bit rusty and out of the loop in terms of the mustachioed plumber, but when I received a Nintendo 3DS XL (with zero games) for Christmas Super Mario 3D Land seemed like the natural place for me to start. After all, you'd think Nintendo's flagship series would best encapsulate their vision for the 3DS, and 3D Land is exactly what I would expect from Nintendo -- a solid platformer that ultimately feels a little uninspired and which relies a little too heavily on pure nostalgia for its selling value.

According to research, 3D Land is the first game since Super Mario Bros 3 to feature the super leaf/tanooki suit that allowed Mario to fly and whip enemies with his tail. That much alone is an obvious callback to the glory days of the series meant to satisfying fans that have been long clamoring for the tanooki suit to make its return, but nearly everything else about the game's design suggests it was built around nostalgia. Most (if not all) of the in-game music is taken from previous Mario games, and the linear style of levels is obviously meant to emulate the original side-scrollers, albeit in a new 3D perspective.

The tanooki suit in action.

None of that is inherently bad. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing, and if there's one thing Nintendo has proven over the last 30 years, it's that their games can be fun and enjoyable even as they continue to rehash and recycle the same gameplay formulas. Super Mario 3D Land is not a bad experience -- it's actually pretty good. It takes the gameplay style of the 2D Marios and applies it to an actual 3D space almost as well as Metroid Prime did with the classic Metroid formula. Super Mario 3D Land felt fresh to me -- something I can't say about the New Super Mario Bros games.

In the end, however, I grew a little disappointed with 3D Land. My biggest issue with the game is its incredible, almost insultingly easy difficulty. There are, I believe, 48 "main" levels, each containing a mere three star-coins to collect. Each of these 48 levels can be completed in just a couple of minutes, and for the most part, each of the star-coins is in a completely obvious location that just requires you to approach them and jump. More often than not, I was able to collect all three star-coins in each level on my first attempt. Upon finishing the first runthrough, I had only missed seven out of 144 star-coins.

Besides the star-coins, there's not much to do within levels except going for a better time. There are numerous hidden areas and smaller challenges to complete, but for the most part these only grant you coins and one-ups, which are equally worthless because you get so many lives that an actual "game over" screen is impossible to obtain. I spent approximately the last quarter of the first runthrough with 100+ lives, never once going back into levels to farm coins or one-ups, because they hand that stuff out for nearly everything you do. To make matters worse, if you die enough times within a level, the game grants you an invincible tanooki suit that lasts the entire level, ensuring that even when the game presents a moderate amount of challenge, you have the option to remove the challenge completely.

Fire Mario in an underwater section.

It wasn't until I reached some of the levels within the final "world" that I started running into any sort of actual challenge -- levels that required a lot of precise jump timing and obstacle-dodging with little room for error. Otherwise, up until that point, I was rarely ever in any danger of dying, and it was only by attempting to explore off the beaten track or through fluke accidents that I ever died.

There are ultimately more stars to be obtained within 3D Land as compared to Mario 64 (many, many more if you include the alternate "special" worlds that unlock after beating the game the first time), but unlike in Mario 64, there's no sense of discovery or challenge in collecting the star-coins. In Mario 64, each star had some kind of objective to complete, and many of them changed characteristics of the levels when you went back for more stars, encouraging replay value and exploration. It required a specific determination to hunt down specific stars. In 3D Land, most of the star-coins are just incidentally stumbled upon in course of exploring a level for the first time, making them feel very unrewarding to collect.

Even the world map lacks any kind of fun exploration. In older Marios, you navigated a type of world map to select levels, and you could usually bet on there being branching paths or hidden levels to discover by completing certain actions within levels. In 3D Land, every level is placed along a completely straight line -- you beat a level, you move to the next one. There's no variety to be had in picking your course to the final stage of each "world" and no way to explore off the beaten path.

Running from a sand monster.

Even the worlds seem to lack thematic cohesion. In past Mario games, you'd have multiple stages within one world, and each one seemed to contribute to the overall theme and progression. In 3D Land, it just seems like we have a bunch of random ideas jumbled up and tossed together in an arbitrary order. On the world map, each world has some sort of theme in the background, and transitions between worlds feature Mario running through a new landscape. But in a seemingly sky-themed world, you visit a tropical island, an Egyptian pyramid, and a haunted mansion. Meanwhile, in the molten lava world, there are an awful lot of lush, green forests and canyon levels.

After making it through the 48 main stages -- a process that took me maybe five hours at a leisurely but competent pace, acquiring 95% of the stars -- you unlock alternate "special" worlds that consist of alternate versions of levels in a seemingly new jumbled order. The alternate levels are the same basic layout as their original counterparts, but with new traps, new powerups, different enemies, other challenges, and three new star-coins to find. In addition, you unlock the ability to play as Luigi. I felt kind of underwhelmed at how easily I beat the base game and was pleased to see more content, but these "special" worlds feel more like content padding than actual content to me.

I'm only partway through the special worlds, and I'll most likely continue to work through them, but only as a way to pass the time. Unlike Mario 64, which had me compelled to obtain every single star in every single level, and which kept me coming back to familiar levels looking for new discoveries and seeing how things changed with each star objective, going back into the levels in 3D Land feels like an exercise in tedium. Part of it's that the levels were so small and fleeting that I never got a chance to familiarize myself with them, which makes the changes hard to notice or appreciate in the second run.

Using the new propeller block to fly straight up in the air.

So that's a fair amount of criticism for Super Mario 3D Land, but there are quite a few things to like about it, too. As you'd expect from a Mario platformer, the controls feel pretty solid and responsive, although the circle pad slider doesn't quite do the job of simulating a full control stick (I had numerous deaths because I didn't correctly gauge my momentum from what I assumed was correct on the circle pad). The levels all offer a variety of gameplay experiences with unique challenges, and I encountered quite a few new mechanics that were pleasant to discover, though in fairness some of them may have been recycled from Sunshine or Galaxy against my knowledge.

Perhaps unfairly, Super Mario 3D Land's biggest failing is that it simply pales in comparison to Mario 64. With the improved technology of the 3DS, the device seems prime to provide a more non-linear, exploration-based Mario game that was popularized with Mario 64; Super Mario 3D Land has brief touches of this within levels, but instead resorts to something simpler and much more straightforward. Despite the relative step backwards, 3D Land is a good execution of a simple (albeit sometimes shallow) gameplay formula.

Not every game needs to be the next Mario 64, and some games are really good for what they're designed to be. I think Super Mario 3D Land is a pretty good mobile platformer with just enough of Nintendo's classic charm and with a fresh enough twist (classic Mario gameplay in three-dimensional stages) to make it definitely worth playing if you have a 3DS -- it just lacks the magic, polish, and overall staying power that Mario 64 and some of its predecessors had.

Undead Nightmare is .... Interesting?

I wasn't very impressed with Red Dead Redemption, but since I bought the Game of the Year edition which comes with the DLC expansion Undead Nightmare, I figured I may as well give it a shot. Besides, the concept of taking a familiar game and turning it into a zombie survival scenario was just too interesting to pass up. "Interesting" is the key word with this DLC, because I'm not sure whether to call Undead Nightmare good or bad. On the one hand, it's really cool to see how different everything is, but on the other hand, Undead Nightmare proves almost as tedious and repetitive as the base game. 

Undead Nightmare picks up between the ending moments of the base game, after John Marston is reunited with his family, but before he's murdered by the government agents. After a serious storm hits, John's wife and son are bitten by the undead, zombified "Uncle," leaving John to tie them up in the house while he sets out to find out what's going on as well as a way to cure them. Along the way he reunites with familiar characters in familiar locations, while rescuing survivors and cleansing graveyards of the undead. 

The biggest praise I can give Undead Nightmare is the fact that it can be completed in under 10 hours; my final time after I'd finished the main questline was 7 hours and 5 minutes, having done all the missions I could but while neglecting the bulk of the challenges. Undead Nightmare still commits many of the same sins as the base game, but being only a fraction of the total length, it makes some of the tedium easier to swallow because it doesn't stretch itself out as much. It also helps to finally see some actual change in the game world -- something I was incredibly disappointed not to see during the epilogue of the base game, after three whole years have passed.

Lassoing War, one of the four horses of the apocalypse

As a zombie game, Undead Nightmare also emphasizes the survival element of gameplay much more than the base game did. There's no economy whatsoever and ammunition is far more scarce, so you have to conserve ammo much more (at least in the beginning) as well as live off the land a bit more, with functional uses for plants and animal trophies. Unfortunately, Undead Nightmare never captures the true spirit of an actual survival-horror game, because after a few hours ammunition becomes just as readily available as in the base game (meaning you have hundreds of bullets at your disposal and no reason to conserve), and without the option for "hardcore" difficulty balancing you get insanely fast auto-regenerating health and dead eye meters. Admittedly, it's really more of a "zombie action/adventure" game, but I feel like more difficulty and survival would've enhanced the experience more.

Combat feels perhaps even more pointless than it did in the base game. In the original, you could at least count on looting money and ammunition from corpses, giving you at least some incentive to kill enemies, but in Undead Nightmare, a majority of zombies don't drop anything at all, meaning more often than not, killing enemies is just a waste of ammo. (Of course, this becomes pointless later on when you're rolling in more ammo than you could ever need.) Combat is not even that challenging, considering the lack of "hardcore" difficulty balancing meaning you can absorb a ton of damage before dying while relying heavily on dead eye. And since most zombies don't have ranged attacks, you can just stand still and let them get close enough to perform the cinematic "executions," thus guaranteeing a one-hit kill.

In sort of the same fashion as Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, there are a number of different zombie types to prevent combat from becoming too boring. There are basic zombies that move at a respectable pace and can grapple you if they get too close, but there are also bruisers that charge at you and knock you over, retchers that spit acid at you and which explode when they die, and bolters that run along the ground on all fours at fast speeds making them difficult to outrun and headshot. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter that much, but it's nice to see some sort of variety in enemy behavior, since basically every enemy in the base game behaved exactly the same.

Liberating a town from zombies, using a torch as a melee weapon

There are, at least, a few new tricks up Undead Nightmare's sleeve to continue to spice up the combat a bit. All of the weapons from the base game reappear in the DLC, but there are several new inclusions as well. The best new weapon is the blunderbuss which has a small AOE effect that gibs zombies and uses body parts from fallen zombies as ammunition. You can make a tonic from various plants to lure zombies to one location before exploding them all with dynamite. You can craft phosphorous bullets to set zombies on fire. You can splash them with holy water. In practice, you may not end up using all of these new gimmicks, considering your conventional firearms in conjunction with the overabundance of dead eye are sufficient, but they're fun inclusions nonetheless.

Where Undead Nightmare really starts to fall apart is in the fact that most of actual gameplay gets to feel quite tedious and repetitive. There are only seven main missions and six side-missions in the game, which aren't terribly involved, so the bulk of the gameplay consists of going around the map liberating towns from zombie outbreaks and burning down graveyards to stop the spread. There are something like a dozen or more towns and outposts to rescue, and each and every one plays exactly the same -- arrive, talk to the town's surviving leader, collect ammunition from chests and deliver them to survivors, then kill off the remaining undead. It got to be tedious and repetitive after the first three I did and I lost interest completely, except that liberating towns is the only way to unlock the game's various weapons.

Headshotting a zombie. 

It's kind of fun at first to see familiar characters like Seth, Nigel West Dickens, Bonnie MacFarlane, and Landon Ricketts (among others), but it drives me crazy that John is so quick to going back to being everyone else's bitch, doing all their pointless random favors all over again. I don't even understand his motivation; in one side-mission, he agrees to return a live acid-spitting retcher to a filmmaker he met in the base game, even though he thinks the idea is completely stupid, because he "wanted to help an old friend." When he returns the retcher, the zombies attack the filmmaker and John makes no effort to save him. What was the point of helping an old friend if you were just going to let him die? Was that supposed to be your idea of ironic justice? What's my fulfillment supposed to be for completing this quest?

Undead Nightmare can be a fun treat if you really enjoyed the base game and are looking for more adventures within that world, but I didn't feel any satisfaction from completing it. Parts of it were really tedious and enervating, and its strongest aspects (mainly in terms of the new variety and the dramatic change in atmosphere) are only enough to make it an "interesting" experience, more so than a genuinely "good" one. 

Dragon's Crown: Good, But Not Great

Side-scrolling beat-em-ups are not usually my cup of tea, but Dragon's Crown looked interesting nonetheless. With its classic western-fantasy theme, evocative hand-drawn visuals, and randomized loot and skill trees, it seemed like it had the potential to transcend the typical shallowness I often experience when playing side-scrolling beat-em-ups. As it turns out, there's quite a lot of unique charm and variety in Dragon's Crown's presentation and gameplay, making it a generally satisfying experience, but it still seems lacking in overall cohesion. 

After spending 20 hours in the first playthrough, the game tried encouraging me to do it all over again in a sort of "hard mode new game plus." I said "no thank you" and was content to be finished with it. As much promise and potential as there is within Dragon's Crown's formula, it just didn't compel me to keep playing.

Dragon's Crown features six playable classes, a hub system, and nine self-contained levels. After picking a class, you start out in the Adventurer's Guild and pick up quests that eventually get you involved in the game's story, and which send you out into the world to battle enemies and eventually to reclaim the fabled dragon's crown. The story is barely existent; reflecting back, I can't even remember what it was supposed to be about. Something about a missing king, and you having to settle a dispute for the heirship to the throne and a resurrected dragon that has to be stopped. It's basically just a bare-bones premise to get you into combat situations.

The six playable classes

The six playable classes all have unique movesets and unique skilltrees, meaning you can have a vastly different gameplay experience depending on which class you choose. I tried the tutorial for each class and eventually went with the sorceress, briefly considering the elven archer, because I preferred the flashiness of mage spells and having to regulate mana usage. With the two melee-centric classes, I often felt like I was just mindlessly button mashing, whereas with the sorceress and elf it felt a little bit more strategic. 

Combat can be pretty fun, with each class having a handful of basic attacks, a handful of unique class-specific skills, as well as equip-able spell books and rings. When playing solo, you have to block and evade at the right times and manage your positioning on screen to avoid being surrounded. Playing as the sorceress, different staves used different elements, which meant completely different skillsets depending on which element I was using. There are also a ton of different enemies that require different strategies to take down, and boss battles that feature unique gimmicks or more nuanced tactics to take down. 

As you defeat enemies, complete quests, and clear levels, you gain experience points towards leveling up, which increases your stats and grants you skill points to be used on class-specific skills or general skills for all classes. This system offers you the opportunity to more uniquely craft your own playstyle and character build, but the unfortunate problem of the game's leveling system is that it rarely feels like you're actually improving. Except for when you learn an entirely new skills, most of the points you'll dump into the skilltree will only make you marginally more efficient.

Riding a fire-breathing velicoraptor

The loot system likewise falls victim to this. Equipment drops (earned from treasure chests and from defeating bosses) are scaled based on level and rarity, with different base stats and the possibility of unique additional effects. The unique twist on this formula is each piece of equipment's stats and effects remain hidden until you spend money appraising it, so it's kind of a gamble each time you appraise an item and sometimes it might not be worth appraising them at all. The problem with the loot, however, is that as you get better and better equipment, you can rarely ever tell the difference in actual performance. 

While the enemies don't scale to your level, the game is balanced so that as you get stronger and progress through the main questline, the enemies will all be appropriately leveled for you. So with marginal improvements in your equipment, marginal improvements in your skills, marginal improvements in your stats, and marginally harder enemies, you don't get to appreciate getting stronger because things always feel relatively the same. It's not until the second half of a first playthrough that you run into the possibility of tough difficulty hurdles, but this basically just requires you to visit whatever stage happens to be appropriate for your level at the time.

After beating the game for the first time, you get to go through it all over again in "hard mode" and later "inferno mode." These new difficulties are actually written into the story, sort of via a retcon -- after spending the whole game striving to kill the dragon and stop the threat, it's revealed that there are actually more dragons, and the goddess statue requests you kill two more to revive the other two god statues. I barely struggled at all with the first playthrough and never went out of my way grinding for levels or loot, but entering "hard mode" it appeared I was vastly under-leveled and would have to grind my way up to face the new challenges, which just didn't seem appealing to me.

A voiced narrator tells the story over animated stills

The levels are pretty satisfying to play through, at least initially, on account of the variety of things to do in each one. The game follows the basic formula of "go to the right" through each and every level, but there are lots of hidden rooms to discover, unique contraptions with which to interact, and later on, branching paths that lead to different areas and different bosses. But even despite that, the game demands that you replay chunks of each level within the same first playthrough and for each and every side-quest, which usually send you into stages you've already cleared to kill x number of enemies or to interact with something you saw long ago but couldn't use without the requisite quest. Even with slight randomization within levels, it gets to be kind of repetitive.

The one thing that makes the level-grinding a bit more appealing is the way the game rewards you for staying out in levels longer. After a while you unlock the ability to continue adventuring into a random stage after clearing a stage, as opposed to going back to town, and doing so will net you better rewards the longer you stay out. The challenge therein lies with maintaining your equipment's condition and your stock of consumable items and spells -- in order to stay out longer, you have to pack extra bags of equipment and pace your item usage. There's even a fun little mini-game between every couple of stages that has you cooking food at a campfire to give your party buffs for the next stage.

The best boss in the game: the killer rabbit

Perhaps the most compelling reason to play Dragon's Crown would be the possibility for cooperative play, locally or online. But since I don't usually like playing with random strangers, I stuck to solo mode, which allows you to recruit NPCs to join you in battle. As you explore levels, you come across the remains of other adventurers, and once back in town you can choose to resurrect the fallen adventurers or lay their bones to rest. The issue I ran into with the NPCs is primarily that the screen gets so cluttered that is becomes a confusing, chaotic mess with attack animations and damage values obscuring everything else on screen. I typically had more fun and felt more challenged when I disabled the option for NPCs to automatically join your party as you adventure.

Dragon's Crown is kind of a simple game that has a surprising amount of depth in it, something that I can see some people really enjoying and spending a lot of time playing. I enjoyed the initial playthrough, but it's kind of slow-going as the game takes its precious time unlocking all of its various features and letting you enjoy the full game experience. And by the time I was finally able to get that full game experience, I'd kind of gotten tired of the repetition and didn't feel compelled to continue with the arbitrary grind. It's an easy game to recommend if you're looking for cooperative gameplay, and it works really well as an on-the-go game for the PlayStation Vita, but it's still not nearly as satisfying as it had the potential to be.