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Once more I was in the mood for some Mega-lo-Mania. I’ve gone into why I love the game before, but I just can’t stop playing it every so often. It is still The Best Game.
This time, I chose Oberon (the camp yellow guy), and when I reached the final level not one but two other gods managed to squirrel away some people for me to fight! Which took about ten seconds as I had loads and they had very few. Ah well.
A game with toilets in it? Surely not. And me, here, with enough spare change in my Steam account from selling trading cards to afford to buy it? Serendipity!
I went in knowing almost nothing about the game, except that it has toilets in it and you’re trapped in the toilets. And that is pretty much all there is to know. You’ve gone into the toilets of a party and then the door to the gents seems to have vanished from the inside and you’re stuck. There are urinals, a couple of sinks, and some cubicles (one locked, one locked and occupied) and you’ve got to escape.
In my head, I was expecting a first-person version of classic Spectrum text adventure series Behind Closed Doors, where the premise is similar, and in a way that’s what I’ve got. You have to find and use items to gain access to other items and areas, but it’s all a bit surreal and there are many ways you can die. Some, like the grenade, are obvious. Some, like the giant tentacle that comes out of nowhere or the humana-humana Squidward are… less so.
There are a load of achievements for “finishing” the game in various ways, although by “finishing” I mean, most are Game Over as you die. I did get two separate “good” (or as close to “good” as it got) endings, as well as all the achievements for the bad ones (which included those in the free DLC that gives you access to another area), so I think I’ve covered “completed”.
A very silly game, but absolutely the sort of nonsense I want more of, please.
This game is big, busy, and full of charm, even if it doesn’t quite hit the same epic scale as the first Xenoblade Chronicles. If you’ve played the first game, you’ll see some familiar creatures (like the adorable fluffball Nopon) and field enemies, but there’s no direct link between the two stories – at least, not initially.
That said, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is prettier than the first game, with vibrant visuals and more detailed environments. It’s also much busier, with a whole entourage of characters following you around. And noisier – if you thought the party chatter in fights was lively before, you’re in for a shock here.
Oh, and the accents? Incredible. The Gormotti cat people sound like they’ve just come from a village in Wales, the Urayans are unmistakably Australian, and the Mor Ardainian soldiers? Straight-up Scottish. It’s an absolute treat to listen to.
You play as Rex, a young salvager who grew up diving into the sea to recover lost treasures from the ruins of a world destroyed hundreds of years ago. In this world, humanity lives on the backs or inside of massive creatures called Titans, as the continents have sunk beneath the sea.
Rex gets hired by a shady organisation to retrieve a mysterious treasure. Turns out, that “treasure” is actually Pyra, a living weapon known as a Blade – and not just any Blade, she’s one of two Aegises, the most powerful of all Blades. Things escalate quickly – Rex gets killed, Pyra revives him, and they embark on a quest to reach Elysium, a mythical paradise where everyone can live in peace. Of course, it’s not that simple. The bad guys who hired Rex have their own agenda, and there’s a sprawling plot involving secret civilisations, ancient betrayals, and events from 500 years ago. Plus, there are loads of side quests.
If you’re familiar with the combat system in the first game, you’ll recognise some similarities here, but there are big differences too. In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, combat was semi-realtime, with each character having a set of moves on cooldown. Your party members mostly acted on their own, leaving you to manage the lead character.
In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, each character has up to three Blades, which are essentially living weapons that grant you their power. Each Blade comes with its own set of moves, and you can switch between them in battle. This means you’ve got access to up to 12 moves at any time, depending on cooldowns.
The combat also leans heavily on combos. You can string together moves to “break” an enemy’s defence, topple them, launch them into the air, and even smash them back down. Pulling these combos off isn’t easy, though. With cooldowns, short timing windows, and the need for specific moves, you’ll need some serious planning (or a lot of luck) to line everything up.
One issue with the combat is how long fights take. Even when you’re massively over-levelled compared to your enemies, battles can drag on for ages. And then there are the special “named monsters,” with their silly names like Glamorous Alfred and Machine Gun Julio. Taking them down can take half an hour or more, even if they can barely scratch you. It feels like a grind, even when you’re doing everything you can to boost your party’s power.
Now, about the Blades. You mostly get them through a gacha-style system by your characters, who are “Drivers”, bonding with crystals you find in loot drops or quest rewards. Some Blades are unique, with their own storylines and voice acting, while others are randomly generated. Over time, you’ll collect hundreds of them. It sounds overwhelming, but thankfully, the game has a clever way to manage them.
You can also send Blades on away missions, a bit like recruiting assassins in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. They go off, complete tasks, and return with rewards. It’s surprisingly addictive and helps you feel like your massive collection of Blades is actually useful, even if they’re not in your main party.
Other than these differences in combat and weapons, the game isn’t really too dissimilar to the first one. It does feel substantially bigger in terms of “hours spent” if not “physical area”, probably due to the increased density and more to actually do. By the time I completed it at around 125 hours in, I think I’d actually come to like it even more than Xenoblade 1, although the first few hours nearly put me off it completely.
I think I had two initial issues with Xenoblade 2. The first was how much had changed since the first game – the location, the combat, the salvaging, the characters I’d grown to love and/or hate had all changed significantly. The other issue was that the first main story mission was on a drab, dark submarine-type ship instead of a massive, beautiful green-and-blue vista like Xenoblade 1 started off. It took me a few hours to start to get into it, but once I’d reached Gormott – a massive, beautiful green-and-blue vista like Xenoblade 1, it had me hooked to the end.
The end, which, despite having the end of the actual world as a possibility if Rex and chums fail, still somehow didn’t have the epic feel of the first game. It was good, although I still don’t really understand the Big Bad’s motives for trying to bring it about (it was a bit like Ultron from the MCU, I suppose – might as well destroy everything because nothing can be bad if there’s nothing there). The main thing that was WHOAAAA was when there were references to Xenoblade 1. I’d hoped there would be, but couldn’t see how. Then I did. No, I’m not spoiling it for you.
The final fight was a bit too easy. I think because I’d spent so long doing side missions and unlocking the skills on the trees for my team, Blades and so on that I was a good 15 levels higher than the end boss so defeated it no problem. Aside from, as I said, it taking ages because most of the fights just do. With the game complete, I could move on to something else but… there are still places to go, missions to finish and more unique Blades to unlock. Maybe I’ll go back and do them?
I only had a few levels left indeed, and in the end they weren’t that tricky – the most difficult part of the game was timing jumps when making platforms disappear.
As I mentioned before, there are various challenge levels to complete, and I will probably give those a go in the near future, but the game’s length was pretty perfect for a handheld title; the way that new concepts were introduced and then virtually discarded after that set of levels led to my interest staying high throughout. It could have been good for the last level to be an extended one with all types of challenge included, but maybe that’s to come in the additional worlds.
There are three more games in the series: two on the 3DS and one on the Switch. I’ll play them all. One day.
Another two player Evercade game. I’ve played Joe & Mac (Caveman Ninja) before, and the sequel, but hadn’t even heard of this. In fact, I thought it was the sequel when I started it up. As it turns out, it’s a completely different sort of platformer.
Whereas the other two Joe & Mac games were sideways scrolling platformers where you club baddies, Returns is a two player Bubble Bobble/Snowbros/Rodland type single screen “clear the baddies” type game. You still club the baddies, but they now need multiple hits before they get stuffed into a snowball bag and you push the snowball bag into other baddies to knock them out too. Defeat enough baddies with the same snowball bag and you get larger fruit meat and more points. Yes, it’s very much like those other games.
With the exception that each between-level animation has the pervy cavemen spying on, or “accidentally” undressing one of the cave women. You’d never catch Bub or Bob doing that.
We completed it, which was surprisingly easy for an arcade game, and found it enjoyable although it isn’t surprising it never hit the big time like those games it apes as it lacks the cute factor and isn’t quite as much fun. Snowballs and bubbles are more satisfying than bags, obviously.
