March 6, 2018
The Spodcast #25: Kingdoms, Dungeons, and Ewoks
It’s medieval castles, Lovecraftian dungeons, and forgotten 80’s children’s movies on this episode of the Spodcast!
We’ve got a Discord now! Come hang out: https://discord.gg/mMupuCr
4 Comments
Add a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I remember that Ewoks movie. My dad used to regularly rent it at the local video store for my sister and me when we were little kids.
I also remember there was an animated Ewoks cartoon.
Darkest Dungeon is super good, I’m curious how you all feel about it once you get further in… There’s some interesting subversions of Lovecraftian tropes going on, but I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that.
Regarding the tactics stuff, I grew up playing a lot of tactics games of western and japanese influences alike, and I think what’s interesting about the game is how it plays with various conventions from both senses of design “sensibilities.” Early Final Fantasy titles utilized row placement (it’s a staple up to 4, beyond that I don’t know), but not to the extent that DD does, with abilities targeting specific positions and usable only from certain positions. The combat is very rich by being very unforgiving of mistakes, and the tactics of the game really do force you to think carefully about which characters to send on which missions, to which regions, which characters to have rest, etc. I think the main issue is that there aren’t enough characters with solid healing skills, so the two characters who do it best end up being in almost every optimal party composition. There’s some other hiccups with the game balance, as is inevitable, though it’s still a great game… or was it just a trick of the light?
My opinion of Darkest Dungeon comes down to a few things. The game had a better balance, pacing, and game feel earlier on in early access. The early to mid-game actually does feel really good in Darkest Dungeon and the voice over was top notch work. I think he deserved an award if he didn’t get one. The biggest problem though is that after the long time playing the game, you hear the same quotes over and over. You can only hear “overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer” so many times before you want to KILL HIM instead. Then you get to the actual late game and the champion dungeons which rely way too heavily on RNG. You can have the perfect party and technically play perfectly but have someone die before you even have the chance to act for no other reason than your opponent got a higher speed roll and everyone crit. This then just throws on top the grind. Because in order to finish the final dungeon, you need to create not 1, not 2, but 4 different groups at MINIMUM at the champion level because no one is willing to go back into the Darkest Dungeon. I also found the ending disappointing. Appropriate for the tone and setting but not the type of ending I like.
The ending really does let down the player, since it essentially reinforces the grind they’ve been fighting through, and essentially renders all of their acitons moot. Lovecraftian stories are all about the futility and hopelessness of humanity in the face of powerful forces beyond their reach, but the way Darkest Dungeon handled it, really hurt the player themselves, rather than just affecting the characters. For a far better done Lovecraftian game, see Yahtzee’s The Consuming Shadow. That game still has humans who are (at best) barely holding off the powerful evils, but it doesn’t waste the player’s time with grind, and the grind isn’t woven into the bloody narrative. 🙂