I'm not a hardcore Dragon Ball Z fan, I enjoy the series and buy any games that are good (like the Budokai HD Collection, Raging Blast 1, or Burst Limit) but I've been following Xenoverse's pre-release discussion and what not since at least November. They revealed a lot more about the game over the last few months (maybe even a little too much in terms of story spoilers) and it looks like it might be a return to form for Dragon Ball games. I mean, it has to be, right? Dimps is making it!
Even though Dimps is making it, which is what the fanbase has wanted since Raging Blast 2 (or you could even argue since Ultimate Tenkaichi), the fanbase for these games is still extremely displeased with some of the decisions the developers made for the game. I've been trawling/lurking boards like Kanzenshuu and the GameFAQs Xenoverse PS4 board and there's tons of nitpicking going on with the game. The nitpicking has showed up since it was revealed that the roster only had 47 characters, excluding Mira, Towa, and Demigra (the new characters in the game that the story centers around), and after it was discovered only one stage (the World Tournament stage) is available for local multiplayer.
Basically, after people came to terms with the above flaws with the game (the roster size is debatable as an actual flaw given the fact that each character is mostly unique and Dimps isn't known for making large rosters) more smaller issues started to get pointed out. These issues don't even impact the quality of the game but just nag at people who are, by and large, trying to have their cake and eat it too. An example of this is: a full roster that focuses on just Z with every major or supporting character playable, a deep custom character creator, and a well balanced game. You can't have all of those whatsoever, character creators in fighting games wind up making the game imbalanced because everyone wants to just use their overpowered custom character and online, typically, doesn't restrict those in ranked. Something has to give, in terms of its breadth and depth.
That's what's happened with this game, Dimps chose to focus on creating a new story that involved our created characters -- something fans have been pleading and begging for... for years -- and Dimps' priority was rightly focused on those two aspects primarily. Those were the aspects of the game they're selling people on, not the combat, not the graphics, not the online multiplayer (though co-op is something they've been advertising, not so much PvP), and so on. Yet the fanbase wants everything to be just as polished and good as everything else for a game that likely wasn't given the budget or time to do that. It's fine to want it but to expect it is the issue and these people cry "lazy developers!" for it when that's farrrr and away from the truth.
The fact is, developers are given a certain amount of money and time to work on and make a game for a publisher. They do not have infinite time and money to do everything correctly for a single game, that's why sequels exist. Bandai Namco is, essentially, taking a big risk with this game because they've allotted Dimps more time than most DBZ games are given -- one can assume that also means they gave them more money to accomplish their goals for it. This means if this game doesn't meet their expectations then they won't budget the developers to do a sequel for next year or in 2017.
While the fanbase/community might be sick of not getting the full Z cast for a roster for any DBZ game since Budokai Tenkaichi 3, this is the way game development works. A first game is not going to get the full Z roster.
That also applies to the issue with respect to how local multiplayer has been handled in this game. My theory is that due to the backlash of Battle of Z last year Bandai Namco pushed/pressured Dimps to put in local multiplayer so they have that checked off -- even if it meant only one stage was possible for use. They didn't design the game for local multiplayer in the beginning, it clearly wasn't in their plans as evidenced by how the other stages are designed. Their priority had always been the story, online (co-op Parallel Quests and PvP), and the custom character system. So they did a half-baked local multiplayer to try and please/attract the players who only play or who do play local multiplayer. Unfortunately, it's not enough and is a legitimate flaw with the game.
What isn't a legitimate flaw, however, are things like Saiyans lacking fully animated tails as customizable options, Another nitpick that isn't an issue is lack of customizing auras (Dimps isn't known for allowing players to do this). The lack of beam struggles or "larger explosions" are also among the smaller issues with the game that, in the long-run, don't even matter and have legitimate reasons for their exclusion for this first game. They can figure out how to do beam struggles in a sequel and "larger explosions" can be put in when the game is solely on current gen consoles.
At the end of the day, the fanbase is far too divided and expects too much from game developers for DBZ games, which are basically low-budget games to begin with. They're not AAA games therefore to expect AAA polish is kind of ridiculous. The only way a DBZ game would get that is if DBZ games sold a lot more than they do now which... they won't. The pinnacle for DBZ will always be Budokai Tenkaichi 3 because of the PS2 and Wii's install bases allowing them to sell 4 million copies.
Again, this game was focusing on new things therefore features fans come to expect had to take a backseat (it's really clear if you just look at the game and see how much was put into the custom character stuff versus other aspects of the game).
Regardless of the pre-release circus and nonsense that's been going on since the Japanese release of the game, I am looking forward to picking it up next week and enjoying the new features that haven't been done in a DBZ game before in this way as well as the fighting engine Dimps has crafted.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
What I thought of Infamous Second Son
This blog has been a bit dead but I'm going to make an attempt to revive it right now with this post. I just finished college a month and a half ago so I want to do some writing while I don't quite yet have a job. In this post, I am going to talk about what I liked about Infamous Second Son, what I didn't like, and where I think Sucker Punch should take the Infamous series next (if there's ever another game starring Delsin or Infamous game in general).
What I liked
The Traversal
One of the main aspects I liked about Second Son's gameplay was how you traverse the world with your super powers. At the start of the game you have your Smoke power, you start off with one air dash and a hover ability. The air dash is similar to one of the powers in the previous Infamous games while the hover works exactly as you remember it. However, your traversal options begin to open up from there as you play the game.
One of the new elements to the traversal I really liked was how much easier they made it to climb buildings. They have vents set up for you to use your Smoke power to essentially "warp" up to the top of a given building -- it's great! It removes the frustration I had with the previous games where you spent minutes at a time climbing these really tall buildings with Infamous' "sticky climbing." What do I mean by "sticky climbing"? Well, it's simple: in the previous games (it's somewhat in Second Son as well) the main character will latch onto everything and anything with ease. However, this comes at a cost where you wind up fighting with the character and wanting him to grab the next ledge above but for whatever reason he latches back onto what you were holding onto just a second ago. This prevents you from continuing to climb up and you have to keep trying until he does finally grab it.
Needless to say, with the vents and other methods the other powers use to get to the top of buildings it removes that annoyance and makes the game much more enjoyable. But there's other aspects to the traversal I liked that deal with the powers themselves.
Smoke has the air dash I mentioned earlier but you can also get an upgrade that allows you to air dash twice in the air. This creates a really cool rhythm where you can jump, air dash, hover for a bit, and then air dash again. It feels really nice and fun for awhile. But then you wish you could go further or sometimes you can't make it. The other powers in the game you get fix this issue and practically make Smoke traversal obsolete.
Neon basically allows you to run up walls and the Video power allows you to glide up walls. I found myself sticking to Neon for most of the traversal, though, simply because of how well it flows together (you get a power that let's you carry the run's momentum to jump from building to building). It feels really natural overall and fits into the game way better. It almost makes you believe different developers worked on this game because most of the game you can just use your powers to get where you want to go which is almost the opposite of the previous games where you couldn't always use your powers to get from place to place quickly -- it was a pretty slow ordeal and probably the least fun of the previous games.
The Combat
I liked the flow of the combat, not the melee but how the developers encourage you to move & shoot. In the previous Infamous games they were much closer to how a traditional Third-Person Shooter (TPS) worked where you seek cover and hide behind it to shoot at the enemies until they're all gone. There was some minor variation in Infamous 2 but it was still very similar to a TPS and that's sort of what took you out of being a super hero in those games. It was almost like Infamous 1 & 2 were basically TPSes dressed up in a super hero skin with a sandbox that didn't even rival the Grand Theft Auto games. Much of the upgrades in them were expanding on your arsenal to shoot (though this is also still a problem with Second Son).
Basically, Second Son gives you these movement options with Smoke, Neon, and Video where you'll want to dash around and shoot. Neon, when you're aiming, even slows the game down like it's Max Payne's Bullet Time and allows you to easily deal with enemies as you're moving.
The only downsides to the combat is the melee and sometimes there are situations they put you in where there's nowhere to take cover to heal. The former is a very big one because the melee is only useful if you're really close to someone otherwise you'll want to just run & shoot instead. It's really disappointing how there's no expanded melee combo system in this series yet -- it's a super hero game! That should be one of the things the main character excels at! Instead, you only have one string and you get an upgrade that allows you to do a melee from a dash and start the string from there. There really should be a combo list, even if it's a few different strings it would make the melee better in the long-run and give the upgrade system more meaning or point.
How Blast Shards were Handled
In general, my biggest issue with blast shards in the previous games was how many of them were in the game and how hard they were to find. It's been awhile since I last played Infamous 2 but they were cumbersome to get because they didn't show up on your radar unless you "sensed" for them and you also had to do something else to get them to show up (I can't remember what it is right now offhand, though). That said, Second Son fixes this where when you clear a district of the D.U.P radio communication vehicle all the blast shards in the area show up on your radar. All you need to do is go to them and collect them. This makes getting all the upgrades possible for the player without having to make tough decisions about what they want to upgrade.
It is because of this change I decided to put in the work to get all the blast shards. It was no longer cumbersome so I went ahead and did it. And, it still felt rewarding to do it as well. I know there's people out there who probably liked looking in nooks and crannies to find these hidden shards but I didn't and never bothered to get all the blast shards in both of the previous games because of it. Great change all around, in my opinion.
What I didn't like
The Story
I won't spend too much time on this because Infamous games really aren't known for good stories to begin with (although I did like Infamous 2's Evil ending) but this game's story was not... very good. Honestly, I feel like the game was rushed out the door so that's why the story is so... uninteresting. I won't spoil anything but just know that if you do decide to get this game, don't expect a very engrossing story -- it's mostly a run-of-the-mill revenge story and it's just not very good at it. I found First Light's story a little more interesting than Second Son's but that's just because some of it is built up in Second Son first and Fetch is a little bit more of an interesting character than Delsin. Both stories aren't mind blowing but First Light is probably better because it's a shorter game so its story is more focused and isn't trying to be a 10 hour venture. Anyway, I just didn't like Second Son's story much.
The Powers
In this game you get access to three powers: Smoke, Neon, and Video (a fourth power opens up to you after you beat the story but I won't spoil it or talk about it since it isn't used in the story). My main qualm with these three powers is how there doesn't seem to be any balance in place -- there's no reason for you to never use Neon once you get it, for example. In my experience, when I played through it, Neon was hands down the best power of the three. Smoke took a backseat once I got Neon fully upgraded. Video, meanwhile, is too unwieldy and the only good thing it has is the invisibility. And even then, the invisibility isn't that great because the game wasn't designed to be a stealth game so it feels worthless.
Not only is there no balance (as in a reason to use every power) but you also can only switch powers via the power sources. This means that if you want Smoke you have to find a chimney, a broken car, or a vent that's emitting smoke. Thus, you have to go way out of your way to get Smoke when you're in the middle of a big fight and don't want to lose your advantageous position. At first, this design decision makes sense because you may be expected to run into these sources to switch powers when you're in the middle of a battle but what winds up happening instead is you find that there's no other power sources around besides the one you're currently using. Neon, for example, is everywhere while Video and Smoke are much more difficult to find and acquire. Therefore, in most instances, you're going to be using Neon so why switch? Never mind the fact that I already said Neon, in my experience, was the best power of the three.
But we're not done yet with the powers. The powers themselves don't differ enough from each other. All of them have shooting abilities, traverse abilities, and melee. However, instead of making them play differently from each other in more significant ways you still feel like nothing's really changed: you're still running & shooting. There's no reason to use your melee more, no reason to jump more, no reason to do anything else differently. And this applies to the upgrade system as well. The upgrades you get don't change the abilities much at all -- they either give you more ammo, make the "bullets" do more damage, give you more meter, etc etc. They're all generally passive upgrades rather than visual or more significant upgrades.
This makes choosing between upgrades (if you plan to get all the blast shards) meaningless because you can just get them all. The only choice you make in the upgrade system is whether you're Good or Evil. If you're Evil, you have to choose the Evil upgrades. If you're Good, you have to choose the Good upgrades. Basically, the upgrade system feels shoehorned in rather than well thought out -- I think, ultimately, it's basically the same as the previous games in this case. Except in Infamous 2, you had a story choice to make on which additional power you wanted which did change the skill tree/upgrade system based on your choice. In this game, there's none of that -- you get all the powers and subsequently you can get all the upgrades for each.
The Story Choices are still Meaningless
As with any Infamous game, at some points in the game you are given a choice in the story as well as which mission you want to do between Good and Evil. There is no middle ground, you have to choose one or the other. There are multiple story choices that you get as well as missions that determine what happens in the story. Or, well, that's what Sucker Punch would like you to believe.
Unfortunately, the choices you make don't really matter to how the story plays out. The choices really only matter for your Good/Evil meter and they might alter a cutscene slightly but what transpires after the fact is generally the same result regardless. This means that despite there being a choice the script of the story doesn't actually change. So, while you might choose something Evil the story will still progress as if you had chosen something Good instead and vice versa. Sucker Punch has, unfortunately, not bucked this trend with Second Son. And this is what makes the story not-so-great in the end.
In any Infamous game, the choice that matters the most is the last one which gives you a different ending. Theoretically, you could go through the entire game as a Good person but then at the way end you could make the Evil choice and the Evil ending will play. I haven't tried this with Second Son, but I know it was at least the case for one of the previous games. The way this system works basically makes the choices meaningless because you don't have any impact on any of the story beats until the end of the game with the last choice. You can't prevent the death of any characters that happen before the final choice, you can't prevent the main character from doing x thing by making x choice, you can't alter what happens to certain characters based on a choice, etc etc.
The best example of this that isn't a major spoiler is right at the beginning of the game. Delsin comes out of the building and sees his relative being held by some of the D.U.P soldiers. The main antagonist comes out from the group and questions Delsin. They have a small back and forth and then eventually the game brings up a choice. The choices boil down to: tell the truth or keep your mouth shut. No matter which option you choose, the relative will still get her ankle stabbed and she will still almost kneel down to the ground and Delsin will go unconscious. All that changes is what Delsin says and how the antagonist responds. Your choice did not change the overall script: your relative still gets hurt and you still need to go and find a cure for your relative.
Thus, that begs the question, why have that as a choice at all? If that's the main plot to the game, why would you make that a choice? If I can't change Delsin's goal for the game or what not then why have that choice if I'm still forced to go the way you want me to go? You see what I'm saying? It's not a real choice. And this is their third game doing this! It's like this in all of them and people have expressed this distaste for it but yet they do nothing to make these choices matter in the story.
Maybe it doesn't because they were rushed for development, I don't know. What I do know is that it's intentional because this is the third game and it's still like this. Just terrible, a complete misunderstanding on choice and how a choice impacts a story. Might as well be considered false advertisement, honestly, because it's one of the features of the series they hype up about it every time there's a new Infamous game. And the joke is, Infamous 2 had more meaningful choices in its story with Cole having to choose between one of the girls to get one of the powers and that impacts what missions you do and what transpires after the fact. This game has nothing like that! It's just ridiculous.
The Side Missions
I'll make this short and sweet: the side missions are not fun. They're essentially busy-work missions, like Sucker Punch couldn't think of side missions that were actually fun. You have your "Where's Waldo?" missions where you have to locate an agent among a crowd of people and kill him. You have your "Find the Dot" missions where you have to locate a ridiculously small security camera and shoot it. You have your "Use the Motion Control of the Controller to do This" missions where you have to spray paint walls and signs. And you have your "Locate this Item" missions where you have to stand in the right spot to get an Audio File which will give you more story background information.
All of these missions are repeated in every district. If you want to 100% this game you will be repeating the same missions over and over again just to get it. And you will find yourself getting tired of them before even completing them all on the first island. They're not fun, they're a real chore and I'm not sure why Sucker Punch thought these missions were enjoyable. They're the most mundane parts of the game and I'm even surprised I went ahead and did all of them. I think I felt obligated, I want to see if the missions changed at all but. . . they don't. Stick to the main missions unless you want to 100% this game to which I say I hope you somehow have fun doing it.
The Final Boss
I won't spoil this at all just like the story but what I will say about is that it's the worst final boss I have played in recent memory. They throw you into a cramped space with no cover to heal yourself when you're damaged and the boss has stupid hitboxes and there's no power sources to heal yourself from either. Not only that but there are tons of small objects in your way that prevent you from moving and only help the boss hit you when you were just trying to avoid getting hit -- the camera does not work well here during this boss fight either. You'll be fighting the camera to see where you might be running into so you can avoid getting stuck and subsequently getting hit. To put it bluntly: this final boss is awful and the developers should be ashamed of it.
What I want to see from Infamous in the Future
If this series is to continue on after Second Son & First Light, it needs some massive improvements to grab me. They need to have a better story that's more focused, they need to have better/more fun side missions, they need more things for you to do in the world they built, they need to make the choices in the story actually matter, and they need to make the upgrades not just passive upgrades but things players can actually visually see has changed. And, of course, the powers need to be more balanced with each other -- there shouldn't be an end-all be-all power. I should want to use something like Smoke in the latter half of the game, I should want to use a new power I get near the end of the game -- the new power should not be dwarfed by the previous one but it also shouldn't be better than the previous one. There needs to be a better balance struck, there.
I wasn't expecting much from Second Son to begin with, I was expecting it to be more of the same but if they want me to buy the next one they need to actually change things up. They had more development time than Infamous 2 yet they pumped out a game that I think is actually worse than Infamous 2 in some regards -- it's kind of crazy. I'd love to make time to revisit Infamous 2 and see if I'm right but I don't really have that time right now since some games are coming out this month I really want to play (hint: Majora's Mask 3D).
In closing, Second Son could have been a much better game than it is. After playing it, I can see why it didn't move people to buy a PS4 last year around this time. If they could improve upon what I pointed out in this post, I think they would attract more new fans and the game could have critical acclaim. But if they're happy with what they're currently getting sales-wise and critically, then they can ignore me and put out another game that follows the same blueprint with minimal changes -- I just won't buy it.
What I liked
The Traversal
One of the main aspects I liked about Second Son's gameplay was how you traverse the world with your super powers. At the start of the game you have your Smoke power, you start off with one air dash and a hover ability. The air dash is similar to one of the powers in the previous Infamous games while the hover works exactly as you remember it. However, your traversal options begin to open up from there as you play the game.
One of the new elements to the traversal I really liked was how much easier they made it to climb buildings. They have vents set up for you to use your Smoke power to essentially "warp" up to the top of a given building -- it's great! It removes the frustration I had with the previous games where you spent minutes at a time climbing these really tall buildings with Infamous' "sticky climbing." What do I mean by "sticky climbing"? Well, it's simple: in the previous games (it's somewhat in Second Son as well) the main character will latch onto everything and anything with ease. However, this comes at a cost where you wind up fighting with the character and wanting him to grab the next ledge above but for whatever reason he latches back onto what you were holding onto just a second ago. This prevents you from continuing to climb up and you have to keep trying until he does finally grab it.
Needless to say, with the vents and other methods the other powers use to get to the top of buildings it removes that annoyance and makes the game much more enjoyable. But there's other aspects to the traversal I liked that deal with the powers themselves.
Smoke has the air dash I mentioned earlier but you can also get an upgrade that allows you to air dash twice in the air. This creates a really cool rhythm where you can jump, air dash, hover for a bit, and then air dash again. It feels really nice and fun for awhile. But then you wish you could go further or sometimes you can't make it. The other powers in the game you get fix this issue and practically make Smoke traversal obsolete.
Neon basically allows you to run up walls and the Video power allows you to glide up walls. I found myself sticking to Neon for most of the traversal, though, simply because of how well it flows together (you get a power that let's you carry the run's momentum to jump from building to building). It feels really natural overall and fits into the game way better. It almost makes you believe different developers worked on this game because most of the game you can just use your powers to get where you want to go which is almost the opposite of the previous games where you couldn't always use your powers to get from place to place quickly -- it was a pretty slow ordeal and probably the least fun of the previous games.
The Combat
I liked the flow of the combat, not the melee but how the developers encourage you to move & shoot. In the previous Infamous games they were much closer to how a traditional Third-Person Shooter (TPS) worked where you seek cover and hide behind it to shoot at the enemies until they're all gone. There was some minor variation in Infamous 2 but it was still very similar to a TPS and that's sort of what took you out of being a super hero in those games. It was almost like Infamous 1 & 2 were basically TPSes dressed up in a super hero skin with a sandbox that didn't even rival the Grand Theft Auto games. Much of the upgrades in them were expanding on your arsenal to shoot (though this is also still a problem with Second Son).
Basically, Second Son gives you these movement options with Smoke, Neon, and Video where you'll want to dash around and shoot. Neon, when you're aiming, even slows the game down like it's Max Payne's Bullet Time and allows you to easily deal with enemies as you're moving.
The only downsides to the combat is the melee and sometimes there are situations they put you in where there's nowhere to take cover to heal. The former is a very big one because the melee is only useful if you're really close to someone otherwise you'll want to just run & shoot instead. It's really disappointing how there's no expanded melee combo system in this series yet -- it's a super hero game! That should be one of the things the main character excels at! Instead, you only have one string and you get an upgrade that allows you to do a melee from a dash and start the string from there. There really should be a combo list, even if it's a few different strings it would make the melee better in the long-run and give the upgrade system more meaning or point.
How Blast Shards were Handled
In general, my biggest issue with blast shards in the previous games was how many of them were in the game and how hard they were to find. It's been awhile since I last played Infamous 2 but they were cumbersome to get because they didn't show up on your radar unless you "sensed" for them and you also had to do something else to get them to show up (I can't remember what it is right now offhand, though). That said, Second Son fixes this where when you clear a district of the D.U.P radio communication vehicle all the blast shards in the area show up on your radar. All you need to do is go to them and collect them. This makes getting all the upgrades possible for the player without having to make tough decisions about what they want to upgrade.
It is because of this change I decided to put in the work to get all the blast shards. It was no longer cumbersome so I went ahead and did it. And, it still felt rewarding to do it as well. I know there's people out there who probably liked looking in nooks and crannies to find these hidden shards but I didn't and never bothered to get all the blast shards in both of the previous games because of it. Great change all around, in my opinion.
What I didn't like
The Story
I won't spend too much time on this because Infamous games really aren't known for good stories to begin with (although I did like Infamous 2's Evil ending) but this game's story was not... very good. Honestly, I feel like the game was rushed out the door so that's why the story is so... uninteresting. I won't spoil anything but just know that if you do decide to get this game, don't expect a very engrossing story -- it's mostly a run-of-the-mill revenge story and it's just not very good at it. I found First Light's story a little more interesting than Second Son's but that's just because some of it is built up in Second Son first and Fetch is a little bit more of an interesting character than Delsin. Both stories aren't mind blowing but First Light is probably better because it's a shorter game so its story is more focused and isn't trying to be a 10 hour venture. Anyway, I just didn't like Second Son's story much.
The Powers
In this game you get access to three powers: Smoke, Neon, and Video (a fourth power opens up to you after you beat the story but I won't spoil it or talk about it since it isn't used in the story). My main qualm with these three powers is how there doesn't seem to be any balance in place -- there's no reason for you to never use Neon once you get it, for example. In my experience, when I played through it, Neon was hands down the best power of the three. Smoke took a backseat once I got Neon fully upgraded. Video, meanwhile, is too unwieldy and the only good thing it has is the invisibility. And even then, the invisibility isn't that great because the game wasn't designed to be a stealth game so it feels worthless.
Not only is there no balance (as in a reason to use every power) but you also can only switch powers via the power sources. This means that if you want Smoke you have to find a chimney, a broken car, or a vent that's emitting smoke. Thus, you have to go way out of your way to get Smoke when you're in the middle of a big fight and don't want to lose your advantageous position. At first, this design decision makes sense because you may be expected to run into these sources to switch powers when you're in the middle of a battle but what winds up happening instead is you find that there's no other power sources around besides the one you're currently using. Neon, for example, is everywhere while Video and Smoke are much more difficult to find and acquire. Therefore, in most instances, you're going to be using Neon so why switch? Never mind the fact that I already said Neon, in my experience, was the best power of the three.
But we're not done yet with the powers. The powers themselves don't differ enough from each other. All of them have shooting abilities, traverse abilities, and melee. However, instead of making them play differently from each other in more significant ways you still feel like nothing's really changed: you're still running & shooting. There's no reason to use your melee more, no reason to jump more, no reason to do anything else differently. And this applies to the upgrade system as well. The upgrades you get don't change the abilities much at all -- they either give you more ammo, make the "bullets" do more damage, give you more meter, etc etc. They're all generally passive upgrades rather than visual or more significant upgrades.
This makes choosing between upgrades (if you plan to get all the blast shards) meaningless because you can just get them all. The only choice you make in the upgrade system is whether you're Good or Evil. If you're Evil, you have to choose the Evil upgrades. If you're Good, you have to choose the Good upgrades. Basically, the upgrade system feels shoehorned in rather than well thought out -- I think, ultimately, it's basically the same as the previous games in this case. Except in Infamous 2, you had a story choice to make on which additional power you wanted which did change the skill tree/upgrade system based on your choice. In this game, there's none of that -- you get all the powers and subsequently you can get all the upgrades for each.
The Story Choices are still Meaningless
As with any Infamous game, at some points in the game you are given a choice in the story as well as which mission you want to do between Good and Evil. There is no middle ground, you have to choose one or the other. There are multiple story choices that you get as well as missions that determine what happens in the story. Or, well, that's what Sucker Punch would like you to believe.
Unfortunately, the choices you make don't really matter to how the story plays out. The choices really only matter for your Good/Evil meter and they might alter a cutscene slightly but what transpires after the fact is generally the same result regardless. This means that despite there being a choice the script of the story doesn't actually change. So, while you might choose something Evil the story will still progress as if you had chosen something Good instead and vice versa. Sucker Punch has, unfortunately, not bucked this trend with Second Son. And this is what makes the story not-so-great in the end.
In any Infamous game, the choice that matters the most is the last one which gives you a different ending. Theoretically, you could go through the entire game as a Good person but then at the way end you could make the Evil choice and the Evil ending will play. I haven't tried this with Second Son, but I know it was at least the case for one of the previous games. The way this system works basically makes the choices meaningless because you don't have any impact on any of the story beats until the end of the game with the last choice. You can't prevent the death of any characters that happen before the final choice, you can't prevent the main character from doing x thing by making x choice, you can't alter what happens to certain characters based on a choice, etc etc.
The best example of this that isn't a major spoiler is right at the beginning of the game. Delsin comes out of the building and sees his relative being held by some of the D.U.P soldiers. The main antagonist comes out from the group and questions Delsin. They have a small back and forth and then eventually the game brings up a choice. The choices boil down to: tell the truth or keep your mouth shut. No matter which option you choose, the relative will still get her ankle stabbed and she will still almost kneel down to the ground and Delsin will go unconscious. All that changes is what Delsin says and how the antagonist responds. Your choice did not change the overall script: your relative still gets hurt and you still need to go and find a cure for your relative.
Thus, that begs the question, why have that as a choice at all? If that's the main plot to the game, why would you make that a choice? If I can't change Delsin's goal for the game or what not then why have that choice if I'm still forced to go the way you want me to go? You see what I'm saying? It's not a real choice. And this is their third game doing this! It's like this in all of them and people have expressed this distaste for it but yet they do nothing to make these choices matter in the story.
Maybe it doesn't because they were rushed for development, I don't know. What I do know is that it's intentional because this is the third game and it's still like this. Just terrible, a complete misunderstanding on choice and how a choice impacts a story. Might as well be considered false advertisement, honestly, because it's one of the features of the series they hype up about it every time there's a new Infamous game. And the joke is, Infamous 2 had more meaningful choices in its story with Cole having to choose between one of the girls to get one of the powers and that impacts what missions you do and what transpires after the fact. This game has nothing like that! It's just ridiculous.
The Side Missions
I'll make this short and sweet: the side missions are not fun. They're essentially busy-work missions, like Sucker Punch couldn't think of side missions that were actually fun. You have your "Where's Waldo?" missions where you have to locate an agent among a crowd of people and kill him. You have your "Find the Dot" missions where you have to locate a ridiculously small security camera and shoot it. You have your "Use the Motion Control of the Controller to do This" missions where you have to spray paint walls and signs. And you have your "Locate this Item" missions where you have to stand in the right spot to get an Audio File which will give you more story background information.
All of these missions are repeated in every district. If you want to 100% this game you will be repeating the same missions over and over again just to get it. And you will find yourself getting tired of them before even completing them all on the first island. They're not fun, they're a real chore and I'm not sure why Sucker Punch thought these missions were enjoyable. They're the most mundane parts of the game and I'm even surprised I went ahead and did all of them. I think I felt obligated, I want to see if the missions changed at all but. . . they don't. Stick to the main missions unless you want to 100% this game to which I say I hope you somehow have fun doing it.
The Final Boss
I won't spoil this at all just like the story but what I will say about is that it's the worst final boss I have played in recent memory. They throw you into a cramped space with no cover to heal yourself when you're damaged and the boss has stupid hitboxes and there's no power sources to heal yourself from either. Not only that but there are tons of small objects in your way that prevent you from moving and only help the boss hit you when you were just trying to avoid getting hit -- the camera does not work well here during this boss fight either. You'll be fighting the camera to see where you might be running into so you can avoid getting stuck and subsequently getting hit. To put it bluntly: this final boss is awful and the developers should be ashamed of it.
What I want to see from Infamous in the Future
If this series is to continue on after Second Son & First Light, it needs some massive improvements to grab me. They need to have a better story that's more focused, they need to have better/more fun side missions, they need more things for you to do in the world they built, they need to make the choices in the story actually matter, and they need to make the upgrades not just passive upgrades but things players can actually visually see has changed. And, of course, the powers need to be more balanced with each other -- there shouldn't be an end-all be-all power. I should want to use something like Smoke in the latter half of the game, I should want to use a new power I get near the end of the game -- the new power should not be dwarfed by the previous one but it also shouldn't be better than the previous one. There needs to be a better balance struck, there.
I wasn't expecting much from Second Son to begin with, I was expecting it to be more of the same but if they want me to buy the next one they need to actually change things up. They had more development time than Infamous 2 yet they pumped out a game that I think is actually worse than Infamous 2 in some regards -- it's kind of crazy. I'd love to make time to revisit Infamous 2 and see if I'm right but I don't really have that time right now since some games are coming out this month I really want to play (hint: Majora's Mask 3D).
In closing, Second Son could have been a much better game than it is. After playing it, I can see why it didn't move people to buy a PS4 last year around this time. If they could improve upon what I pointed out in this post, I think they would attract more new fans and the game could have critical acclaim. But if they're happy with what they're currently getting sales-wise and critically, then they can ignore me and put out another game that follows the same blueprint with minimal changes -- I just won't buy it.
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