How Little Do I Care? - The Games I've Played

I was working on 100%-ing FF13 for quite some time, I put in some serious time and effort to make sure that I got everything, and did everything possible. The bad part about that is that it was a game that I had already played and knew a lot about and even commented on a lot about in here, and so I beat it, and then moved onto a game that a friend gave me, Heavenly Sword.

Unfortunately, it's one of the worst games I've played in a while.

You see, you start out the game, at the end of the game. It's not even en media res, it's en finale res (if we can butcher some Latin, knowing little about grammar or vocabulary considering it's a dead language).

You see, you start out at the main character dying, saying something along the lines of, 'well now, that was fun, but now I've got to die, but it was worth it!'

Okay everyone, gather around for a quick lesson about story telling. I have to tell my freshman students about these rules so I thought I might as well crack open some knowledge and share it with you as well. You see, in the typical story arc, it looks a bit like this.

And in that story arc, there are some great things called introductions, and rising action. There's supposed to be one great high point in the story (the climax, get your head of of the gutter you dirty kid) and then there's a resolution. Unfortunately, because of how the story was created, because I played the first ten minutes of the game, I knew the entire story!

I knew who the bad guy was.

I knew that she killed a lot of people.

I knew that the sword she used to kill people was killing her.

I knew she was about to die.

I'm going to be honest with you. As a person who prides himself in finishing the games that he started, I did not finish this game, because I knew it all. I knew exactly what the story was going to be. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew every single second of it, and the ONE solitary plot twist that I thought could possibly happen to twist everything and make it worth playing I had to go onto Wikipedia to figure out if it was ever going to happen because it wasn't worth it to me to sit through an entire game that was boring.

I'm an English professor (I put down person at first, deleted and put major, deleted and put teacher, then finally deleted and put professor, it still hasn't sunk it yet) and I like a good story. I like something that can keep me going and keep me interested. It doesn't take much. It can even be simple, but what I can't stand from anyone is when you spoil the entire story for me in the first 10 minutes of telling me the story, and then expect me to sit through the long winded version. No, that's not what I'm going to do. I don't like it. It's bad story telling, and it's bad game production. Don't do it.

Story aside (and that's a big thing that I just pushed to the side), the game play is horrible. I can deal with stupid game play, but this was just annoying. Remember how I don't like QTE's? That at no point have I ever supported the idea of 'kill someone until they get down to a certain % of their health, then bash buttons when we tell you to so you can kill them in a pre-rendered cut scene and take the actual control of the character from you'? Yeah, that's what this was.

I don't like them. They're stupid and they're lazy. You don't want to fight the guy you're fighting right now? Hopefully you've killed enough guys since the last time that you did this but just press circle and you'll automatically kill any mook in the game. Wait long enough between pressing circle, and instead of just automatically killing one guy, you can wipe the floor of an entire area of mooks (which are politely waiting for you to kill their friend before they try to stab you in the back. It's almost like going to a dance and having a group of people surround two people that are having a dance off, and waiting for their turn to jump in and show everyone just how awesome they are.

There's twenty guys with swords there, and instead of just ganging up and stabbing you, they politely wait their turn for untimely circle usage to automatically die.

Then there is the subtitles.

I play everything late at night when people are sleeping. Volume is at a minimum, so I always have subtitles on just in case I need to read what I can't hear on the volume that is at a 4 when normal Netflix volume is somewhere around 18-22.

There is a general understanding with subtitles. They are there for people to read. And there is a general understanding that it is white text with black outlines, but the black outlines have to be big enough to show separation between the white and the color, if it is too thin it doesn't work.

Heavenly Sword doesn't believe in this.  It doesn't even take the approach of other subtitles making the subtitle area (the bottom of the screen typically) shaded a darker color, just to make sure that the text is even more visible. Nope, they just stick with white text. The problem with this? You'll notice that the main character is wearing white, and is pretty pale as well.

Whenever text goes over her (which is quite often considering she is the main character and all) you can't read whatever is happening. Now, this might not be a problem for people that can hear, but for those of us who are either deaf or are playing while small children are sleeping and don't want them to wake up to the sounds of hoards being slaughtered, get to do a create your own adventure sort of deal with what is being said.

The final deal breaker for me was the complete lack of progression of our main character. Gaming 101, your character that you start out with, should never be how the character is at the end of the game. You get the sword that the entire story is about, and that's it. You've got everything. There's no power ups, no fairies in bottles, no wings of Icarus, no mount, nothing. You've got the sword that the entire game is about, and you've got the sword.

For how much this game plays like a God of War clone, it's sort of missing some key elements. It's like someone said, "You know what God of War needs less of? Story progression!" and created Heavenly Sword. You don't care about the main character because you know she's going to die. You don't find any of the bosses challenging because you know they're going to die. You know exactly how everything turns out, and you know that you're not going to change it so yeah for button mashing and killing the exact same three/four types of army units over and over and over and over and over again.

There is one (yes one) singular exemption from this rule. In honor of this being one of the earlier games on the ps3, they wanted to use all of the cool things that the ps3 could do, like the controller having the ability to notice if you're tilting it. To abuse this, any time that you shoot or throw anything you can go into bullet time and control whatever you just shot or threw. This is a cool idea, but you are forced to tilt your controller like an idiot any time that you're trying to do this.

RIP anyone who doesn't use a normal ps3 controller because you're going to have to plug in one of your approved Sony controllers, because there's no way around it and the game forces you to bend bullets, shields, arrows, or whatever else you can get your hands on to throw, throughout the game. You just smashed the heads together of a small army with excessive amounts of violence, but you really can't seem to open up a simple gate without having to frisbee a shield off of three points while bending it around obstacles just to hit a trigger that no one would normally be able to hit.

This brings me to my last and final point. When creating a dungeon in D&D or doing anything creative of an area in a story, I have to think about the people that made it. Why in their right mind would anyone put in an impassible trap or series of devices just to get to the next area? Why in the world is it required of me to boomerang a shield to bounce off of objects to unlock a door? And also, why, if the people created it this way, did they leave an infinite number of shields sitting in a pile in the EXACT spot that I need to throw them from? Seriously? It's a pretty wicked defense plan, but to put the solution in the exact spot that you need it? Why? Just why? Why is that even a thing?

I don't mind weird traps, or triggers, or even puzzles, if they make sense. If it makes sense to the story, I'm all up for weird elements. But if it's a puzzle just for the sake of a puzzle and you're forced to do it the way that the creator wanted you to just because there's no possible solution outside of that, it gets annoying.

It is a mystery to me how Heavenly Sword could ever score anything remotely as high as it did on any game review. The only thing that has any quality about it, is the fact that the graphics don't suck.