[
Archive] for archiving sake.
Thank you, I didn't have time to read or fuck around with archival when I noticed it, I mostly just shunted it over for everyone else to have their fun.
Now then, since Jim's written reviews are far easier to go over because they don't require having to hear his fucking voice, I decided to react to all of it. Just for something fun to do while I wait for my computer to do actual work.
Jim's Shit Review said:
Rise of Ronin puts me in mind of the criminally overlooked first-person shooter Singularity.
Essentially an FPS “best of” collection, Singularity took a ton of existing ideas from the genre’s top titles and pulled them off incredibly well. Rise of Ronin does the same thing with two different categories, drawing inspiration from a range of Soulslike and open world games to craft something that, while not exactly new, is incredibly well executed.
I too am a fan of Singularity. It is a game that, in the immortal words of a
far better reviewer and YouTuber, is "the game that got Raven software sent to the COD gulag, and it's way better than it has any right to be." It is hardly a masterpiece, it is more like a great game stuck inside an unfinished, unpolished, rushed out disaster of a game that lets you see all the makings of what could've been the greatest FPS of the 2000/2010s (it had a 2010 release date making it hard to know which people would've wrapped it up into). Sadly, due to Activision's greed and impatience, is frankly a 6/10 game made out of the butchered and poorly stitched together corpse of a 9/10 or maybe even 10/10 game. It went through a truly disastrous development, and it butchered my favourite FPS studio of all-time when Activision decided that they failed them and banished Raven to the CoD mines.
Jim has a very rose-tinted view of the game, and has for many many years, which he has mentioned several times over the last decade or so, and while I love the game, I have never felt it deserved
his praise to the degree he gives it [
a], but that might be due to the fact that I got to it once I already was settling into my career in the video game industry and that made me very cynical towards anything that I could tell never met its potential. My professional opinion is actually that this game is the biggest fuck up of poor planning and not giving a team enough time by Activision and their rush job hack of a producer Kekoa Lee-Creel, a man who is a fucking moron at the best of times in my opinion, resulting in a fucking disaster of a game due to them giving it no where near the time for what it was meant to be.
Rant aside, this begins a trend that I really dislike about Jim's review style lately, it is too reliant on referencing other games. While I have played some of these, there is a good chance that someone looking up this game and going through reviews will have no idea about some of these and might be fucking clueless about what Jim is talking about. Or they might have checked out long ago from some of the longer running series. It also feels very unfocused.
Sekiro, Bloodborne, Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin’s Creed, and the developer’s own Nioh have all been thrown into a blender and the resulting mulch is surprisingly smooth.
I've played the first, second, and fifth games listed here. I have yet to play
Ghost of Tsushima, but will once it is out on PC most likely as that is coming out soon and I've heard good things about it from people's whose opinions I sometimes agree with. Now, the really useless one here is Assassin's Creed as it is a franchise that has very distinctive eras that play very differently, so which era of it are we talking about? I actually really liked the slower more planning focused first game, but then you have the Ezio trilogy which I actually appreciated as a nice continuous story of someone coming into their own and growing from boy to man to elder, and then you have the era where we had the colonial era and age of sail stuff going on which really were just a mess for the formula by leaving their urban roots to attempt something with more wilderness which really didn't result in games that felt like they belonged to the franchise. Then you have the absolute slog games that were way too long, but attempted to return to the urban experience back in Europe, but they suffered under the weight of "content", being "cinematic", and being rushed messes as at this point the AC churn was at its peak. This naturally leads into the modern era of AC, which are completely different games more similar to traditional action RPGs and open world games with large open fields than the urban stealth action games the series started out as. So, which part of Assassin's Creed was put into the blender Jimbo?
Jim really feels like he wants to talk about every game except the one he is reviewing at times. He relies a bit too much in comparison overall, and it just bothers me. This is also a very petty complaint, as a quick comparison like this is actually useful for reviewers to quickly sell you on what a game is like. Funnily enough, the only game he really proceeds to compare it to strongly here is Sekiro. In fact it is the only game that ever comes up again from this list.
Essentially, Ronin takes the standard “AAA” open world formula and centers it around an accessible version of Sekiro’s stealthy parry-based action.
This means something to me, but what about people who haven't played Sekiro? I know a lot of people who play a wide variety of games but skipped Sekiro either because they don't like Souls-likes as they prefer different genres, including open-world games, or because they heard about the reduction in customization from the soulsborne games and skipped it for that reason, so maybe you shouldn't crouch things so much in comparison.
Also, I actually like the idea of there being a more accessible subgenres of these genres traditionally noted for their difficulty. We got way too many hardcore "hard" games currently, I think we need to start seeing more ramps up to those. Entry points for people to get comfortable and climb their way up to the greater challenges. I believe it is good for the industry for this ramp to exist, and it provides a method for people who are less experienced to gitgud.
However, as you may expect of these games, any attempt to follow its narrative melts away before the real point of the adventure - running around assassinating people, taking photographs, and collecting cats.
Nebulous busywork is out in full swing to the point where Ronin’s map looks exactly like one you’d find in an Ubisoft product. Much as I love this game, the sheer amount of repeated tasks - be it clearing bandit camps or praying at an arbitrary collection of shrines - inevitably gets tiresome even as my various neurodivergences compel me to do everything.
PL time, I got some of the same issues Jim
claims to have, but I have some fucking self-control. I'm not a dog who needs his next dopamine hit so I don't crash, actually the real issue is due to the exact issues Jim
claims to have the dopamine regulation is so fucked beyond all belief that the tiny hit that doing such tasks would give me makes me feel no compulsion to chase them. I get a far bigger hit through the feeling of mastery one gets from overcoming challenge and adversity than checking things off a list for reward. For example, in my own time right now I am playing
Pikmin 4, a game, like all games in its series, that makes the autism tingle when you plan out and execute a plan just right. I am currently finishing up the last few platinum medals in the final dandori challenges and battles for that 100%. Something that requires a degree of planning and execution to achieve. It isn't a
hard game by any respect, but it is one that requires some cognitive engagement by the player. It is one big puzzle of constructing a plan and following it to finish everything before the clock runs out. Something that is actually a bit hard with ADHD usually, unless the fixation kicks in, as it means remaining focused rather than being a scatterbrained retard with no discipline. Sometimes these challenges require multiple attempts to determine whether or not the plan you come up with will work or not, and there's a sense of mastery over a particular challenge once you do it.
That said, it took a long time for me to start feeling drained by the side content because everything is so quick and convenient to complete. Environmental puzzles are straightforward and the terrain is open and easy to navigate. The simple act of moving around is a treat.
Controls are responsive with a character that moves both swiftly and fluidly. Your horse can automatically arrive to scoop you up at a button press, and the horse itself handles really well which is always a nice surprise. There’s a grappling hook, a glider, and a beautiful ability to transition from gliding to horseback in one motion. That’s just something cool you can do by default.
Oh, and stamina doesn’t drain out of combat. Why should it?
And this is the real reason Jim likes it. It gives into
convenience at every point. There is nothing standing between him and the next cheap dopamine hit. There's nothing standing between him and what he wants. There's no need for planning. No need for coming up with a solution to the problem. It just lets you do the thing without punishing you for a lack of planning.
There's good reasons to have stamina not drain out of combat, it lets you increase the power fantasy of the game for example, it is more convenient if you don't want the gameplay loop to focus too much on the out of combat aspects, and it helps keep you at full strength for when action breaks out without needing a pause before hand if there's no other forms of preparation one might take beforehand. Now, after admitting to those valid reasons, if the experience you want to deliver focuses on them, there are also reasons to have it drain out of combat. There's actually a lot of discussion among developers over this one currently. Some of are in the camp of removing out of combat stamina for convenience and accessibility, a few are even arguing that stamina in any form should be removed from games as a whole as an archaic inconvenience designed only to impede the player.
Others feel like stamina draining out of combat is a good way to limit a player's out of combat activities in interesting ways just as it does in combat, linking the two a way that is familiar and which can create more interesting and dynamic situation if you used a stamina intensive method to get into a combat situation and then find yourself lacking upon arrival, making poor stamina management out of combat a punishment for poor planning going into battle.
There are even some of us who care more about that prebattle planning portion than the out of combat restrictions and are actively experimenting with limited stamina drain out of battle (for example prototyping ideas like stamina only reducing to the 50% mark when used out of combat, but no further) so that you aren't facing undue inconvenience or forced to just stop and stand around when exploring, but also still encouraged to slow down and prepare for a battle when you reach one. There's also been experiments in infinite stamina when no enemies are nearby, but once you get too close to an enemy stamina becomes an issue, thus leaving you more vulnerable.
All of these change the feel of a game, how vulnerable the player is, how difficult it is, and where the focus of the player and gameplay experience end up being. There's not universally correct answer here as it depends on what challenges you want the game to focus on, what aspects of the experience you want players paying the most attention to, and where you want players to be spending the majority of their time. The joy of gaming is in the overcoming of impediment and challenge. That is what sets apart the stories of games from the stories of movies, the fact that a player had to come up with a way to get past the barriers to their victory along the way themselves.
So I ask you Jim,
why shouldn't it?
Combat is similar to Sekiro in that parrying lies at its backbone. Aside from specific special attacks, most enemy offense is telegraphed only via the aggressor's animations. Said animations are really clear and communicative, so telegraphing works quite well, albeit with a sly catch - enemies enjoy using deceptive rhythms and quick little feints to throw a player off. A few particular styles can be utterly frustrating to defend against thanks to their misdirection.
Most attacks come at you in sequence, requiring multiple deflections in quick succession. To parry a combo, you only need to successfully defend against the last blow. It's a highly appreciated way to recover from bad timing, but it cuts both ways - missing that final deflection costs you your parry opportunity even if you nailed every other hit beforehand.
While missing that last shot is a pain, Ronin’s parry system forgives more often than it punishes, and it’s incredibly satisfying to succeed at. Breaking an enemy's defenses and opening them up for a super fancy finisher is presented with a lot of shattering bombast.
Importantly, thanks to the ability to create multiple builds from all sorts of diverse equipment, players less able to nail parry windows and counterattacks still have access to survival methods.
Once again back to the obsession with comparison. Moving past that, the fact enemies try to trip you up is interesting, I do wonder if the same can be done to the enemies? Can they catch onto your rhythm? Can you actually delay or feint yourself to create openings? That is actually an interesting idea, but I don't think you can as Jim didn't call it out.
Overall, slightly too forgiving for my tastes on the surface, but I actually could see this as an appealing system that, if you have those earlier hits in the combo be punishing enough, could actually provide a fun and engaging challenge. I also personally prefer a tight focus over "unlimited freedom" in my games. I much prefer games that commit to doing one thing
very well than I do a game that does a million things passably.
While fundamentally challenging enough, Rise of Ronin is more yielding than the average Soulslike, offering powerful guns, friendly checkpointing, plentiful healing, and enough upgrades to create truly game-breaking builds should you wish.
Once again, I don't know just how easy the game is, if it is just a bit easier on the slope of difficulty that is the genre that it could lead into a more difficult game, then I am all for it, but if it is an outright "power fantasy", well I can't feel powerful picking on the weak. I'm not a troon or a sexual predator, sorry. I need something powerful to choke slam to my level and force it to look me in the eye as I inform it that no height of power is too high for me to drag it down into the mud with me. I do hope that it is a solid entry level or intermediate game for getting into the genre though, because that is what Jim seems to be trying to communicate, but hard to tell with these accessibility obsessed lunatics who don't want to play games.
Stealth continues the game’s commitment to ease of use, with swift crouch walking, buttery sneak kills, and a communicative HUD that clearly lets you know when you’re hidden and who can be stabbed up. As with the sub-weapons, stealth is surprisingly more effective than one might expect. Most regular enemies will go down in one hit, and managing to backstab a more formidable foe will deal huge damage. While frontal assaults are unavoidable, a subtle approach is plenty viable and will almost always make standard fights less of a gang situation.
More of Jim's preference for convenience over challenge. He wants his content and he wants it NOW.
See, this is something I actually find off putting. Stealth action is one of "my genres", and I understand the value of making stealth movement slow. It means you need to plan out your movements better. Stealth kills being a one-hit kill is also a bit of a problem to me, as it quickly opens up the path to the Skyrim problem with a Stealth Archer. Anyone who has done any intensive examination of Skyrim's combat is aware of the insidiousness of the Stealth Archer Playstyle, and this is due to simply how sneak attacks work in games that don't focus too greatly on stealth.
In Skyrim an attack from stealth does increased damage, this can provide a powerful and effective opening hit before you charge in with your axe, however overtime your ability to deal that powerful opening attack improves ever more, first you are bringing a strong enemy down to low HP, then you realize if you can nearly kill the big guys, you can probably kill the small guys. Then you realize you can clear out most of the room from stealth, then you find yourself just sneaking around killing everything from the shadows looking for someone who can survive your shots as it overcomes your playstyle. It is human nature to take the path of least resistance, and something as powerful and low risk as a stealth playthrough should be countered with robust and punishing AI that can, in fact, withstand your murder spree as well as enough barriers to it being too effective to make it infeasible in certain situations unless you want the game to be focused on a stealth assassin playstyle.
Rise of Ronin’s story missions always team you up with two side characters, but they can be swapped out with online players and doing so will destroy any mission. Personally I find this hilarious, but those who want to fight bosses as intended rather than simply wail on them and laugh will want to solo all the missions. Whatever online balancing Team Ninja's done has not worked out in the A.I.’s favor!
Here's a rare peak into Jim realizing some people might not want a super convenient cakewalk. That said, this is an actual criticism of a the game's systems, in this case poor coop balancing, but it is rather surface level. His take on the multiplayer component of the game in general really shows he's very much not satisfied.
Here it is, a chance for Jim to randomly toss in a current leftist political statement randomly. It is pretty innocuous, but considering Jim's track record we both know he's trying to make a statement here about generative AI while talking about
video game enemy AI. It just came out of no where. On first read I mentally put in "the" between "fuck" and "A.I.", but no you can tell this is a randomly shoehorned in political take.
Oddly, for a game that pushes cooperation so much in its thematic content, Rise of Ronin’s multiplayer could stand to be far better. You may only go online to play missions you’ve already beaten, which means the pool is incredibly shallow when you start and has to incrementally improve as you continue. Sadly, all the open exploration and a litany of sidequests are restricted to single-player since cooperation is for story missions only.
I will say this does sound pretty bad, almost tacked on. I wonder if the game was originally more linear, or if multiplayer was a late addition to the game hearing this. It was never a focus of the Fromsoft formula,
Elden Ring being notable in that it was actually designed with some amount of coop in mind for more than bosses. In those games coop was designed as a way to make the most difficult parts of the game easier. It was a non-explicit difficulty option, similar to the summonable help in the more recent game
Lies of P. Something a lot of the people screeching it was too hard refused to accept as a valid response when they wanted an explicit easy button.
It could also be a simple matter of creative vision, with them not wanting to cheapen the side content too much in difficulty by having multiple players. There's also the fact they might simply be trying to avoid having multiplayer result in large amounts of missed content because another player ran off and did something else. That's an actual problem that can detract from some games,
Baldur's Gate 3 for example suffers from that issue, as I often find myself a little bit sad when playing with friends that I got to an NPC late or someone else initiated the sequence or dialogue, as it means I don't get to see any of my own unique dialogue or I might completely miss what they had to say or what there was to do with them. Though it just means on future solo playthroughs or replays in coop I will ask to be the person who does that segment of content while they do the stuff I went off and did. No clue if something with the content flood of
Rise of Ronin, if Jim's assessment is accurate, would be as suitable to replaying to see the side content that was missed due to other player's doing it on me, however. A lot of design works, not just technical work, goes into enabling an enjoyable coop experience without detracting from the core experience.
I also can't think of any compromises to this issue that wouldn't be quite annoying in themselves. You could only allow the host to gain completion, but this would mean you'd tediously have to redo content you already did that is mostly filler. You could simply tether players closely together, but in a game like this with a supposed focus on exploration and swift movement that'd also be a bit of a pain and get in the way of cooperatively searching over an area to find something by spreading out. You could require everyone to individually be involved in the process or collection of the collectable, but for clearing camps how do you determine if someone put in enough contribution to count? It is actually a tricky issue to get right in open-world games.
While I understand how much more work it would be to implement consistent co-op rather than unceremoniously dump players back to their own games the second a boss dies, it’s hard to go back to an obtuse From-style online structure after
Lords of the Fallen finally modernized things. The result of Team Ninja’s implementation is online play that very much feels like a separate feature bolted onto a single-player experience.
Funnily,
Lords of the Fallen (2023), the version Jim is referencing here as there was also at 2014 release with the same name, actually didn't do that well in the audience reception department. A lot of souls-like fans bounced off it pretty hard, and it was a fairly controversial and divisive game Steam puts it at 61% for both recent reviews and all time reviews. Critically it got a 75 on Metacritic, with a user score of 6.7. Which still isn't great. Jim linked his own review in this review [
a], and gave it a 8.5. I skipped it, because I didn't see anything new to be worth experiencing. Just felt like tossing some context here.
That said, I personally dislike the term "modernized" here. Since that implies that FromSoftware's goals were the same as in
Lords of the Fallen (2023). They really weren't from what I understand. For FromSoftware the coop is meant to get you over a particularly nasty bump in the road (and notably bosses are the only content in those games you can't just skip if you want to), with the game chilling out very shortly after and allowing you to just run straight past. The goal is that you will overcome the bulk of it alone. For
Lords of the Fallen (2023) they were trying to create a fully coop souls-like experience. A lot of compromises to how open the game actually was and how it had to deliver its story had to be made to do that. It is a mostly linear experience, limiting exploration and freedom so that you can trap players together and ensure a consistent experience as you work your way forward. Something like
Rise of Ronin would actually be far more difficult to design multiplayer for, as well as to design multiplayer around. The best way to do so would actually be some always online nonsense or getting fancy with the instancing and instance merging based on proximity. Something that could lead to some weird desync issues or require quite the spike in processing power requirements, which would need to be borrowed from other places, potentially performance, to overcome. Unless, once again, we took some rather unpleasant compromises like tethering into the equation.
Then again, Jim seems to believe in the universal game design philosophy, AKA, all game design is moving towards a single universal "optimal" way to make games which is the best way to do something in all cases because anything in the past is inferior due to being in the past because Progress™ always moves forward and regression will never produce something better because why would you ever try something unless it was so flawed it had to be replaced and anything you replace it with must instantly be better because you replaced it! It can't possible be that sometimes we need to experiment to get experimental results, and different goals and visions require different tools to do so. Clearly everyone is trying to find the way to get to the One True Game™, and everything else is a stepping stone and not different independent creative and artistic works.
That said, multiplayer in this entire genre is often "bolted onto a single-player experience" as Jim puts it, partly out of a feeling of obligation that it needs to be there due to the genre founder, FromSoftware, having it tacked on as a way to make bosses easier.
[Jim gives opinions on control scheme]
The rest really is just talking about control scheme issues, and I'd have to play it to see how bad it is. That said, Jim has the same preference it seems as I do, put melee combat buttons on the face buttons and not the bumpers. This is a preference thing though, and I play stuff like Monster Hunter on Keyboard and Mouse. For those who know those games they are probably thinking I am a gunner. I'm a blademaster. Yes I am insane. Yes my fingers contort into eldritch forms to hit the buttons I need to to execute my combos. I use a controller for things like souls-likes and platformers though. Individual preference is weird in this domain. Some people think top right side face button is the correct jump button, others think the bottom is the correct jump button, and some think it goes on the other two face buttons on that side. It really depends on your gaming background I find and how your brain is wired.
I just really like this game. Despite my general distaste for repetitive chores in open world playpens, I've been hooked on Ronin’s gameplay loop thanks to how thoroughly pleasant it is to just navigate through the world. Its approach to busywork is the same as its approach to everything else - even the most tiresome padding is still a breezy, communicative, user-first interaction. See a cat, pet a cat. It doesn't need to be more tedious than that.
Rise of Ronin really likes its players, and that’s what I love most about it. While its world features a lot of busywork, it’s also a joy to explore thanks to how easy and versatile movement is. An enthralling combat system openly traces the best of Sekiro and Nioh, serving the extract in a more accessible fashion with a huge variety of ways to fight. While co-op is restrictive, it’s still really funny to go online and turn bosses into confetti, plus you can run a cat rental service.
This is his little sign off for the game, his closing statement. I didn't quote every detail here, but I felt I should include this. It also reaffirms something about why I think the real reason he rates this game so highly after
Dragon's Dogma 2, it gives into his desire for ease and convenience.
You know, the most frustrating thing about Jim's takes on when he dislikes a particular design philosophy or decision is he doesn't really feel like he wants to discuss or enter the discourse concerning the topic. He wants to dictate his opinion onto you. It is why I find his tantrum over
Dragon's Dogma 2 so frustrating. Him disliking the game for whatever reasons, so long as it wasn't based on a complete misunderstanding of systems or mechanics which were presented in a way that he could reasonably be expected to have a proper understanding of them, is perfectly fine and valid. As someone who works in the industry the discourse over why some people dislike something and others like the same thing is valuable and something I want to see more of, but Jim just manages to be a total twat about it. He doesn't want discourse, he wants to be the final correct opinion. Fuck that mentality, no matter who has it.
