Pseudo Review - Journey

Writing a traditional “review” of Journey might be an impossible task. All reviews are subjective to some degree, and chances are that if you bother reading videogame reviews with any degree of consistency, you’re aware that often you just have to bite the bullet and form your own impressions. Still, for most games, there is at least a template of expectations that many readers hold when they read through a review: first comes an examination of story, then of graphics, then of gameplay, then sounds, etc., etc.  Journey, though…Journey is a different beast entirely from the typical videogame. Plenty of games elicit very personal and unique responses from their players; I’ve certainly teared up over a game or two. Still, Journey is an almost indescribably personal experience and any review of it simply cannot compartmentalize it in the traditional way. That’s probably part of the reason for the choice of name: each playthrough is a different and unique journey for the player.

 

Journey was developed by thatgamecompany. Keep an eye on this indie!

If one were to focus solely on each individual element of Journey for a traditional review (graphics, gameplay, story, etc.) the final score would probably be a solid, but not earth-shattering positive. The backgrounds are definitely beautiful to look at, but other games have done gorgeous deserts and mountains before. The controls are simple to learn and work perfectly, but plenty of games can tout that accomplishment. Likewise the music and story, in a vacuum, are not particularly noteworthy and the story might even be termed a little lackluster. It is only together and with reference to the whole picture that each element comes to be something special.

In Journey your character does not speak. Communication takes place solely through a glowing pulse and honking sound that your character can emit. This makes up one of two main reasons why the game is so impactful. The other reason is that in Journey, as similarly exhibited in games like Demon’s Souls, other players can enter your game as you play. In Journey, the other player can’t particularly hinder you other than through annoyance; however, it is very possible for them to help you. Now, given my experience with online multiplayer communities in games like Halo and Call of Duty, I wasn’t expecting much from this feature, but boy was I wrong. Because you can’t speak, players lose the motivation to trash talk or abuse and are left with the option to play on their own or help – in my very first playthrough I was treated to just how special it is when someone decides to do that very simple thing.

This is what the pulsing looks like. This and the sound it makes are the only ways to communicate

I met my new friend in the desert. His/her cloak was much longer than mine, but at this point I did not understand that cloak length and quality are tied to your character’s health. Through the silent desert, through caves and snow drifts – my new friend guided me unerringly toward our goal and unquestionably made the game easier for me. Possibly unknown to him/her, he/she also allowed Journey to affect me personally on a deeper level. I mentioned before that your character can’t speak. The background environments and the soundtrack are also designed to be beautiful without providing much interactivity. Without another player, the experience would have been incredibly lonely; but with another player, the game became something sublime.

Without my friend, I would have been completely lost

I never wondered why my friend and I were struggling so hard to reach our goal (the top of a distant mountain). The story, such as it was, brought up more questions than answers. I know one thing though. The game’s vistas, music, gameplay: I never viewed them as empty as they would appear at first glance. As my friend and I travelled, I marveled rather at how we were able to solve puzzles so quickly and easily. Granted, he/she had experienced them before, but we were somehow able to connect without being able to speak beyond brief honks. This is what makes Journey so special and unique. As players build connections between themselves, they are tied as well to the environments in which they act and to the way the game progresses. Ultimately, I developed a stronger connection to the game than I possibly could have playing through a traditional 1-player game in which interaction might take place through NPCs or by travelling through the world. Even other multiplayer games that provide for cooperative online gameplay cannot achieve quite the same effect as Journey. By enforcing a lack of speech and placing players with random strangers, Journey ensures that the first puzzle players must solve is that of human relationships. That’s the real journey right there, and it’s a unique and empowering one.

Oh, and to briefly continue the story: my friend and I connected through PSN after the game, had a cordial conversation and are still friends to this day. It’s refreshing to realize that in this age of hatred and bigotry in online matchmaking lobbies that games still exist that can bring out the best in their players.

Game Review - Animal Crossing: New Leaf

I know I'm late to the Animal Crossing review party. I'm a gamer who really likes to play a game extensively before forming an opinion, and the way Animal Crossing is structured just makes that a difficult task. As many of you probably already know, there's no particular narrative to Animal Crossing games and New Leaf is no different. For me, this has often been a drawback for the series; I never really got into an Animal Crossing game before New Leaf because there was too little structure and the multitude of things to do just made me anxious. Well, suffice to say, New Leaf has addressed my concerns in a big way and is an absolute gem for 3DS gamers of all types. I've put well over a hundred hours into New Leaf, a total that is generally reserved only for the more extensive RPGs of my gaming library.

The number of different spoken lines all these little guys have is crazy

For those new to the series, Animal Crossing games all begin with your character moving to a new town populated by anthropomorphic animals. The gameplay mostly revolves around gardening/fishing/pawning (in order to pay of the house-loan with which you're immediately stuck) and interacting with the colorful personalities of your particular villagers. The series prides itself on letting gamers move at their own pace. You can literally just spend every day planting and watering flowers and you never have to donate to the museum or renovate your house unless you want to.

In my opinion, the key to change to this formula between New Leaf and its predecessors is the role you fill in the town. You still choose your gender and everything on the bus ride to a new place, but this time you are mistaken for (and eventually truly take over as) mayor of your own town! This lends a small but critical change to the pacing of New Leaf as compared to other Animal Crossing games: as mayor, you have a running series of public works requests on which to work at any given moment. So, in addition to the chatting with villagers and scrimping and saving to improve your house, New Leaf provides other little benchmarks to provide you with a sense of progress throughout the game. 

Town Hall renovations are one example of a public works project

That sense of progress is key, because there is so much to do in New Leaf that it would be easy to lose interest just because you feel like you're floating with no clear goals. I often felt that way while trying to play older Animal Crossing games and similar games such as Harvest Moon have always walked the fine line between freedom and boredom as well. In New Leaf, however, the speed with which you can upgrade your house has been improved, and with the addition of these new public works goals, I never felt like I was lacking for a goal nor overwhelmed by having too much on my plate. 

Of course, the main attraction for "life-sim" games like this isn't necessarily the progression through goals. Even in older Animal Crossing games where I felt a little without guidance, many people found pure enjoyment from the simple acts of chatting with villagers, sending mail, growing fruit, fishing, etc. All these things make a return and with few enough tweaks that series veterans will easily recognize them and slide right back in to their familiar patterns. Speaking of which, the attention to detail that was clearly the foundation of this game's development make "slipping back in" ridiculously easy (for example, check out this piece from Kotaku on the localization team that worked on the game: http://kotaku.com/inside-the-treehouse-the-people-who-help-make-nintendo-1301809672). The graphics are crisp, and the sounds are appropriately funny or atmospheric as the situation demands. Everything about this game screams polish.

The online community that has developed around New Leaf is also certainly worth taking note of. Perhaps it's no surprise that in a game all about bite-sized customization (you can put your personal stamp on your house, clothes, village and even hair) a thriving social community would evolve around sharing things. The internet has been inundated with blog pictures of weird villager sayings and crazy town designs, whether on big video game news sites or smaller blogs. The game also builds some sharing into the equation by letting you visit strangers' towns (in dreams) and friends' towns via the train. Although Friend Codes are still difficult to work, the service is free and can provide a nice sense of a larger world in which your own village exists. 

Check out this crazy village!

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is an easy game to recommend. However, there is a significant caveat to enjoyment that all interested gamers should be aware of before purchasing this game. New Leaf is definitely more suited to shorter play sessions. Although your character is mostly free to do whatever he or she wants to do on any given day, there are limits to the fruit you can pick or rocks you can destroy (although bugs do constantly spawn for your hunting amusement). That's why I found this game to be incredibly handy as a digital title. Given the fact that New Leaf lends itself so well to shorter play sessions, not having to waste the 3DS cartridge slot for 30 minutes of gameplay on my lunch break was super convenient. All in all though, Animal Crossing: New Leaf is one of the best games out for the 3DS at this point and I fully recommend it to anyone whether they're looking for a game to fill 10 minute intervals over the course of a workday or looking for a life-sim to suck away their real life hours for months.

Why the 3DS Has My Attention

I've never been much of a handheld gamer. There, I said it. Oh sure, I've owned plenty of them--from the PSP to the original DS. The only one I really was ever able to get into was the Gameboy Color, and then only because of Pokemon. Significant Caveat: I loved Pokemon. The Gameboy Color was the first system that my brother or I were allowed to have (probably around age 10) and we probably sank at least 300 hours each into our copies of Pokemon Gold and Silver. However, for whatever reason, the Color was more the exception to the rule in my experience with handhelds and none since then have been able to kindle the same passion. Why is that?

It's a question I've never even really been able to answer myself. It can't entirely be the games, although that might have something to do with it. The Gameboy Advance and the first DS had fantastic libraries of games, and though I'd rank the PSP's library slightly behind those, it still had a very strong showing (much better than the first few months of the 3DS and all action to date for the PS Vita). What makes it even stranger is that I've always been a fan of the games as opposed to any of the technical aspects of gaming when it comes to consoles. Case in point: although it started out slow, by the end of last generation, the Wii was my go-to gaming console. I was just more interested in games like Xenoblade, Last Story and Epic Yarn even though I loved plenty of the offerings on the PS3 and 360. Even though the hardware of the Wii was unquestionably worse, I still enjoyed my experiences with that system to a greater degree because of the games. So why do different rules apply to handhelds?

Does size matter?

This might sound silly, but I've been coming to think that it really is a question of size and realism. There is a critical point of graphical and audio integrity beyond which improvements are nice, but don't break "suspension of disbelief." The Wii-PS3-X360 generation was entirely past that point, so improvements of one system over another didn't affect me as much as the quality of the games themselves. Handhelds, however, had not reached that point, in my opinion. As a kid I was able to look past the flaws of the smaller screen and worse graphics because my imagination worked at a higher gear. It's not that I enjoyed imagining more or that I was capable of "better" imagination; suspension of disbelief was just more easily triggered. Now, most of my handheld gaming takes place at work or in shorter bursts of time between doing stuff at home. When these constraints are added to those of a small screen and fewer polygons, it just makes games harder to get into.

Enter the 3DS. One item of note, first: I have the XL version so I can't speak as to the merits of the base model. I've found this system is able to break me out of my handheld doldrums. The graphics, while not amazing, are crisp and the screen is big enough that it almost feels like a small console. The feature I was most surprised about though, is how well the 3D effect really works. I was expecting a gimmick but it really does draw me in. Even if I'm just sneaking a quick ten minutes in a break at work, I always find myself losing track of the world around me--even when playing games like Animal Crossing, a series for which I had very little love prior to the 3DS entry.

I plan on doing a blog later on my console gaming habits. As a brief summary, I find it almost a requirement to set an appropriate ambiance for me to really lose myself in the game world. This might require the lights being off, a specific block of time in which I know I will be uninterrupted or anything. The 3DS is the first handheld in 15 years that has given me a similar feeling. As the console generations begin to slow down in terms of the innovation and change we see between one group and the next, I can't help but wonder whether the next horizon for innovation in the gaming hardware sector might be in handhelds.

What are your gaming habits? Handhelds yea or nay? How do you feel about the patterns of innovation in gaming hardware moving forward?