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October 2024 Retrospective

Sorry for being a few days late with this retrospective but the drive to write them really is starting to wane.

Bioshock Remastered

I beat Bioshock Remastered via Steam this month and even after 17 years it is still a better game than 90% of what's released today. It may not have the graphical fidelity you get "for free" when building something with Unreal Engine 5 but the game and level design are nearly perfect.

There really was something special about the seventh console generation. The bump in horsepower gave us mind blowing visuals (for the time) but also unlocked the creativity of game designers. The subsequent generations have put such a focus on graphics that game design has fallen to the wayside.

Bioshock Remastered is easily going to be in my top 5 games of 2024 and I highly recommend everyone play it, whether it is for the first time ever or the first time in 17 years.

Beat Metaphor: ReFantazio

To understand why I was so excited about Metaphor: ReFantazio you need to understand the history of its developer. Atlus is a Japanese game developer who became well known for their Shin Megami series. A spin-off was created called Persona that became even more popular and for a decade it was lead by Katsura Hashino. His final game in the series was Persona 5 which is one of my favourite games of all time. It is an almost perfect distillation of what makes the Persona games great. After the release of Persona 5 Hashino wanted to move away from the series and started a new studio inside Atlus. He was joined by multiple members of the Persona team including artist Shigenori Soejima and composer Shoji Meguro. In late 2016 they announced they were working on a new IP, codenamed Project Re:Fantasy.

I will admit that I basically forgot about this game for the last several years. Whenever I thought about Atlus I thought about Persona 6 and was desperately awaiting any information as to its release. So when the "Prologue Demo" for Metaphor: ReFantazio dropped in September I was caught off guard. But after playing it for a few hours I immediately saw it was built upon the bones of Persona 5 and could not wait to get my hands on the full game in October.

After 76 hours I achieved the "True Ending" of Metaphor: ReFantazio and can confidently say that it is an OK game. And it really pains me to say that.

Everything from combat to story to writing to even music is better in Persona 5. I know this is not what happened but it feels like Persona 5 was in pre-production and then just as it was about to shift to full-production the codebase was copied and work began on Metaphor: ReFantazio. Nothing in Metaphor is egregiously bad, its just that Persona 5 did it better.

A prime example of this is the "Baton Pass" in Persona 5's combat. I've written at length about how the combat in the Persona series isn't fantastic but they've streamlined it such that it doesn't bog you down. Rather than banging your head against the wall while doing chip damage to enemies you instead focus on hitting their weakness. This can be easily done by "passing the baton" to a teammate who has the ability to hit that weakness. In Metaphor you have the ability to pass your turn onto the next teammate in line, but if they don't have anything that can hit the enemy's weakness you need to pass again which burns one of your full "turn actions". Also, in the Persona series when you hit an enemy's weakness you can go again so a single character can go through an entire squad of enemies on their own. In Metaphor if only one of your teammates has something that can hit the enemies' weaknesses they can go at most twice every round. This results in battles that drag on and eat up both health and mana points which cannot be easily regained.

One of the hallmarks of the Persona games is that every dungeon is tied to a very important story beat that plays out over a month or so and usually revolves around a specific character. Each dungeon is effectively a mini-game onto itself and they have had some incredible antagonists over the series' history. But as I am writing this I struggle to recall any interesting boss from any of Metaphor's dungeons because they were all faceless baddies whose motivations always boiled down to "do evil for evil's sake". This would be a bit more palatable if the primary antagonists were interesting but they also aren't. We get Evil Pope versus dude who wants to burn down the entire world because it will somehow make us stronger. Their goals and motivations are comically over the top from the moment they are introduced until their deaths. After about 40 hours of Metaphor: ReFantazio I just wanted it to end because I could not bring myself to care about the story and yet I was barely halfway through my playthrough.

I am not upset that Metaphor: ReFantazio is a mediocre game, I am disappointed because I know what these game developers are capable of. The first 10-15 hours were really enjoyable but just couldn't be maintained. I suppose the most damning thing I can say about Metaphor: ReFantazio is don't play it unless you've already beaten Persona 5 Royal and Persona 3 Reload because you're going to enjoy those games much more.

Watched Wolfs

When I see a trailer for a film with George Clooney and Brad Pitt I know I'm going to watch it regardless of the premise. This month that film was Wolfs and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There seems to be some hate online for it being cliche but it is a tight, standalone story that I was interested in from beginning to end. That is something of a rarity these days where everything needs to be a franchise so a focused tale about two "professionals" colliding on a job was right up my alley.

Atarashii Gakko! Toronto Concert

Atarashii Gakko! is one of Elsie's favourite bands so we got tickets for the Toronto leg of their tour. Live music can be really hit and miss but Atarashii Gakko put on a truly phenomenal show.

Costco Hot Dogs

After moving into a detached home I have embraced the suburban life and converted to the Costco religion. This month I finally partook in communion and tried the legendary $1.50 hot dog and drink combo. I have seen the light and no longer view this is as a challenge but the path to nirvana:

Practical Engineering: The Hidden Engineering of Landfills

Practical Engineering's YouTube videos have been recommended me to over the years but this recent one on landfills finally made me click that subscribe button.

Review October Goals

November Goals

#MonthlyRetrospective