Review: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Rich Meister Gaming

 Game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch(reviewed), Wii U

Release Date: March 3rd, 2017

Price: $59.99

In 2017, it is fair to say that The Legend of Zelda is a franchise that Nintendo has kept pretty close to the chest.  While they’ve never turned out something truly horrible, the past ten or so years have seemed somewhat stagnant. Windwaker is a fantastic game with some slow points, Twilight Princess has some amazing Dungeons, but it’s bleak and dark art design left me wanting. While other titles like Phantom Hourglass tried too hard with gimmicks like touch based controls.  Most of these games are fantastic on their own merits, yet still, stick to concepts and gameplay elements Nintendo had been using since the era of the SNES and A Link to the Past.

I’ve been through the desert on a horse with…

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Do I Play Games Anymore?

Fuck I don’t know. I feel like I really have not for a long time. I dick around some in games. Dick around some in WoW, played some Record Keeper on my phone, and I was flipping on Assassin’s Creed: Unity a bit and trying to finally get some of that DLC done. Didn’t get far. I look at my Steam library a lot, does that count? No probably not. Definitely not. Point is, I am at school a lot, and doing school work more often than not.

But I am starting to turn it around. I recently got my hands on the newest Assassin’s Creed title, Syndicate. I find this game so much fun I am making time for it. Also I am trying to get myself back on the stick with my computer. I did buy this Alienware after all, it should be used. I have been steadily making my way through a replay of Batman: Arkham Asylum (you know, the good one), and I started Fallout: New Vegas the other day. Also the Mega Man Legacy Collection is damn near perfect in execution, which makes it damn near perfect. That isn’t a game to “get through” though; it is a title to sit down for a bit and dick around with.

I have other titles on deck, stuff like Massive Chalice that I really want to get to. Also I haven’t forgotten about Persona 2. It just…Persona 1 is better. Also I need to sit down and finish that damn thing I started forever ago, talking about Wrestlemania. I know I come off as really lazy, but I really don’t think that’s the case. But bear with me. It gets better, I think.

-Ray

Review- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona

Originally released in 1996, Revelations: Persona was a game firmly rooted in two schools of JRPG game design. First, it was a RPG from Japan that was released before the huge sea change that was Final Fantasy VII. It was never a glamorous game, it wasn’t a multi-disc affair held up with overly long cut-scenes. It was poorly translated, with every Japanese element of the game being Americanized, in an effort to apparently make it palatable to Western audiences. It was also rooted in the Atlus RPG philosophy of making grind-filled, long, fairly difficult games. Atlus also likes to make games with many systems layered on top with one another. Their best known series of the time, Shin Megami Tensei was a series that was known for a layered, punishing turn-based combat system, that also involved talking to and recruiting the help of your demon enemies.

Running with many of the mechanical premises of SMT, the new spin-off series, Persona dropped the SMT prefix that was present in the Japanese edition and came to American shores, and seemingly sold kind of okay. The Persona series has since floated itself through the PS1 and PS2 eras of RPG’s, changing and reforming itself the entire way. It all came to a head with the late PS2 title, Persona 4. After riding high on the large popularity bump Persona 4 gave to Atlus, they decided to go ahead and give the people an enhanced remake of the first Persona game, this time on the PSP. This happened in 2009. I finally finished my first step down Persona memory lane the other day, on the Vita. Let’s talk about it for a bit.

New Computer Inbound

I have had a Dell laptop now for a while. It was my second computer, the one I mainly used at work. It was a big, hulking thing, weighing in at close to 10 lbs, but it also had a 17 inch monitor, and was decently powerful. It had no intention of running high-end games, but it could play WoW, it could run Marvel Heroes and it could allow me some quality time with Diablo 3. However, that all came to an end a few weeks ago when the screen broke. Don’t ask me how it broke, but it did, and it is not being fixed. Funny enough, the physical damage protection plan I got for it expired only this June. So instead of shelling out the money for a new screen, I decided to use the line of credit I have with Dell and finally take the plunge on buying an Alienware laptop.

Unlike the giant screen my Dell machine was sporting, this laptop will only have a 13 inch screen, which is still totally serviceable considering I can just hook it up to my 24 inch monitor when I am using it at home. But I have had the machine now for a week now and I have to say it is pretty great. It is definitely a machine that will carry me forward through the next few gaming years. It’s actually a little funny, I never considered myself a PC gamer, but maybe that was because I did not have a machine that could play everything I wanted to. That is different now, and I have to say, it is nice having options.

-Ray

PSN Sales Are Killing Me (Softly)

The box art is so purty

The Playstation Network is having one of their increasingly common Steam-esque sales. The Summer Sale, this one I believe has more than a few hot hits up for sale at a steep discount. Maybe you realized that living one more day without Greg Hastings Paintball 2 would actually cause you physical pain, like a thousand paper cuts. Or you saw the glaring hole in your existence that could only be filled by the addition of the Duck Dynasty game, available now for the PS3 and the PS4. If either of these are true, PSN has you covered, as it had me covered the other day when I decided to drop some money on these sales, and pick up some games I have wanted to play for a while now, on the cheap.

Now I am a PS Plus member, so some steeper discounts were applied to the items I purchased, but they are still pretty cheap, even without being a PS Plus member. I managed to finally pick up a game I have wanted to play since I heard of it, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc for the PS Vita. Coming in at 16 dollars, this is the cheapest I have ever seen it, physical or digital. I want to know what that bear is all about, damn it. The sequel, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is also at the same low price point, but I am comfortable holding out for now, at least until I know I like the series. As it stands right now, I am relatively certain I will love the games, but who can be sure really?

The other two games I picked up were both actually PSP games that can be played on the Vita. That is amusing because they’re both also strategy RPG’s that first appeared on the PS2, eventually being ported to the PSP.  It’s amusing at least to me. It’s also pretty great that buying both games only set me back 8 dollars. Phantom Brave: The Hermuda Triangle was only 2 dollars. At that point it basically got into that “Why not?” pricing area that I normally only say with Steam sales, or Humble Bundles. While Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness was not in that sight-unseen impulse buy area, it was a game I tried a few times to get into, and failed despite actually liking it. Mostly I think it is that I saw and heard how deep that game can go, and frankly it scared/scares the crap out of me. You have battles in the world, you have battles inside your weapons to level them up to have better battles in the world. It is basically the Inception of SRPG’s.

Always wanted to check out this game

For now, it seems all three of these games are going to be thrown on top of the ever-growing pile of shame that currently haunts every moment I am playing another JRPG that is going to take me dozens of hours. Even so, I am satisfied with the purchases, and definitely the price. I honestly have no clue of Microsoft does sales like this on their console, but they should. A lot of these titles are old, but still completely viable, playable, and fun games that should reach a wider audience that maybe has a tighter wallet. Also I just realized, I think all these games were published by NIS. Ha, didn’t even notice that until just now. So what about you folks, find anything that tickled your fancy on the PSN sales lately?

-Ray

Final Fantasy VII Remake, The Stuff That Should Change

Yesterday I talked about some of the things that I think should stay the same in the upcoming remake of Final Fantasy VII. While the game was groundbreaking in 1997, quickly earning a status that is sustained to this day by fans, there are some aspects of the game that have not aged very well at all. On top of that there have been changes to the fiction surrounding Final Fantasy VII, thanks to the ancillary things, like the other games and movie. So simply slapping a new coat of paint on the game and calling it a day is clearly not the answer. What should be hacked out or changed?

First thing that needs to be changed is the writing. The script for Final Fantasy VII was a damn mess. Not that translations for any games were amazing at that time, however, FFVII‘s issues are all the more glaring, probably due to the sheer size of the game. Using the original script as maybe a bad first draft, more passes are needed on the game’s writing, it needs to be improved in a few ways. Everything needs to flow better, errors need to be fixed, and one very uncomfortable character needs to be completely reworked.

Final Fantasy VII Remake: What I Want To Change And Stay The Same

This was supposed to be on the internet a while ago. But I tend to get lazy with these things, so here we are. E3 2015 came and went back in June, and with it came the announcement that Square-Enix has finally committed to remaking the 1997 PS1 RPG, Final Fantasy VII. An important game in not only Square’s history, but the history of video games at large, people have been clamoring for a graphical facelift of FFVII with each new generation of consoles. Square has always been cagey about the subject, saying it will not be done, saying it will not be done until they make a new game that surpasses FFVII in quality, etc. However, it seems the time for running through the excuses has finally ended. Coming to the PS4 first, Cloud stealing the identity of his best friend and performing terrorist acts will be finally coming to a new generation of game players.