Dragon Age Inquisition - The Dawn Has Come

Let me tell you about a little company called BioWare. BioWare are responsible for some of the absolute greatest games of all time: The RPG powerhouse that is Baldur's Gate 2. The galaxy-trotting blast of an adventure that is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The mind-blowing martial-arts RPG and under appreciated gem that is Jade Empire.

Unfortunately, in recent years, they've fallen on somewhat harder times, a period that I think of as "new BioWare". Whilst all of the Mass Effect trilogy was well received and are pretty solid, they lack the depth of previous BioWare games, and the later two suffer of a really weak storyline that's only held together by the quality of the characters. Dragon Age: Origins has a solid world and story, but I personally felt the actual gameplay was tediously slow and uninteresting, even if most of the internet seemed to disagree. Dragon Age II had a few good ideas, but was absolutely eviscerated by a very short development window which forced its story to feel unpolished and its gameplay to feel like sandpaper. To put the nail in the coffin, Star Wars: The Old Republic, whilst only mediocre, was a failure big enough to pretty much end the wave of MMOs trying to get World of Warcraft money.

There is a feel to new BioWare that I really dig. They've got a certain manner of creating stories and especially characters that feels very pleasant, it's just a shame that they've not really nailed it per say. The later Mass Effect games are probably the closest they've come, and they are two of my favorite games of all time, but even then they never felt quite right. There's just a stupidity to the plot that requires you to suspend your disbelief just a little bit too much, a couple great characters too few to feel completely satisfying. Every other new BioWare game has had those same issues in even bigger doses, with a few more piled up.

Dragon Age Inquisition is the game that I've wished every new BioWare game was.

After all the tension between the Circle of Mages and Templar Order carefully and effectively set up throughout both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, the Divine (read: Pope) Justinia of the Chantry (read: Church) calls a conclave, where all the big leaders of both of the factions are to sit down and talk through their differences, coached by Chantry bigwigs. Unfortunately, the conclave magically explodes, leaving only a single, unaffiliated, survivor and more importantly tearing a hole in the sky, nicknamed "The Breach" that spews demons from the Fade, as well as more, smaller holes called "Fade Rifts".

You are this survivor, and the mark that has mysteriously appeared on your hand is the only way to close these rifts. This is honestly my least favorite part of the game, the fact that you're set up as someone with clear exclusive ability to solve this situation. This diminishes the accomplishments that the game clearly wants you to feel are something you've done through sheer power of will. You're hailed as someone who's an inspiration, someone who's accomplished superhuman deeds, but this feels hollow when you know it's physically impossible for anyone else to have accomplished them.

At any rate, this mark causes people to rally around you, and makes you an important member of the Inquisition, a newly re-established order, separate from the Chantry, Templars, or Mages dedicated to fighting the threat of the Breach. As the game goes on, the Inquisition grows from a small movement everyone waves off as a bunch of lunatics trying to do impossible deeds to a power that the most powerful rulers of Thedas are wary of. Your missions evolve from making contact with the Revered Mother of a small village to navigating the Imperial Court of Orlais.

This is a fantastic next step from the previous two games. Where Dragon Age: Origins allowed you to become well acquainted with the nation of Ferelden, Dragon Age II gave you a really in-depth knowledge of the one city of Kirkwall. Dragon Age Inquisition spans the entirety of Southern Thedas, leading you everywhere from the stolid, western-Europe inspired Ferelden to the deceptive, pre-Revolutionary French inspired Orlais, and even, briefly to the much more nontraditional Free Marches. The Inquisition is a power that affects a continent, and it shows.

This allows the game to create a large amount of extremely interesting characters. You've got the return of Varric, the overly smart Dwarven Free Marcher from Dragon Age II. You've got Sera, a Fereldan Robin Hood, member of the vigilante organization Friends of Red Jenny. But you've also got characters from backgrounds we've never seen before, like the very Orlesian and manipulative Vivienne, the disgruntled but grandiose Dorian from the Tevinter Imperium, or the Nevarran Princess-made-Chantry-Seeker Cassandra.

One of the cooler things it that a few of the main "interactible" characters aren't actually party members. BioWare has dabbled in this before, with characters like Joker, Cortez or Traynor from the Mass Effect series, but they always felt more like side characters than proper "party-member level" people. Your advisers (Commander Cullen, Spymaster Leliana and Ambassador Josephine), feel like proper characters, with their own large quest chains, huge amounts of character development and character arcs. It adds a bit of credence to the idea that not every interesting person carries a sword and is willing to go out with you into the field to bash a dragon's head in.

I'm going to say this right now: This is the best cast of characters a BioWare game has ever had. Better than the beloved cast of the original Mass Effect, better even than the cast of Mass Effect 2, which was a game almost entirely dedicated to developing (and carried by) its cast. Aside from the most boring characters in the game, Solas the bland mage and the aforementioned Vivienne, any single character here is good enough to be my favorite if they were put in any of the Mass Effect games, only being possibly beat by Mordin. These guys have it all. They're funny, they're endearing, and most importantly, they're absolutely fascinating. All of these characters are interesting in one way or another, whether because of what they have to say about the world around them, how their upbringing affected them, how they see other characters... anything, really.

A few standouts are Sera, who is hilarious, and has one of the most touching romances in any BioWare game, as well as Josephine, who is endearing, likeable, and almost got me to ditch Sera for her. Warden Blackwall's personal quest made me make one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make in a videogame, and I loved seeing how torn Varric was between his loyalty to his friend Hawke and loyalty to the Inquisition's cause. The biggest standout, however, is probably the motherfucking Iron Bull, who is not only an extremely interesting window into one of the less represented cultures in the Dragon Age universe (the Qunari), but also hilarious, and just a really, really cool guy who I aspire to be like.

The biggest surprise came in my own character. You know that thing that BioWare was trying to do with Commander Shepard of Mass Effect fame, where he felt like a fully fleshed out character you gave your own spin to? You know how what ended up happening instead was he just ended up being a boring character who made it so you couldn't do exactly what you wanted because Shepard, and how the dialogue wheel often felt like it was constraining you from saying what you wanted? The Inquisitor is Commander Shepard done right, with the dialogue wheel done right. The Inquisitor is a character with certain character traits that you can't really change. They're brave, and wanting to do the right thing. They don't know that they're up to their position, and they fear failing the many people that are looking to them for help.

Everything else is up to you. The Inquisitor comes from wildly different backgrounds depending on your race-class combination, and this matters. Playing as an Elf Mage, I could bring up my ancestry a whole bunch, allowing me to express belief in a different religion from that of the Chantry, which caused issues when believers in the Chantry took umbrage to the Inquisition being led by a non-believer. My relationship with Sera almost crumbled over this, when she saw me as "too elfy". I was a victim of racism in the Orlesian court, having trouble carrying out my objectives and making the position of my political allies weaker just for the fact that they were bringing a "knife-ear" into court.

Similarly, the importance of my class in the Dragon Age lore was not overlooked, inviting an equally large of contextual events and conversation options. I don't know how much difference there is between being a Warrior and a Rogue however, since neither of them are as big a thing in the lore of the series.  All of this results in your character feeling very unique, with who you are making a big difference in how you interact with the world.

Even discounting that, you're given plenty of interesting ways to play your character. There's a lot of things you can say that feel like they'd be outside the scope of the story, protests that you'd expect the writers would want you to ignore. Instead, you're allowed to put them out there, have them answered, and occasionally you're allowed to further continue questioning them, getting into real, genuine discussions. This means you're likely to be able to create, personality and belief-wise, the exact Inquisitor you want, to the point that there's several chooseable voices at the start of the game for this fully voiced protagonist. THAT IS AMAZING, especially in a game with so many hours of voiced dialogue for the main character. This isn't Saints Row, this is a BioWare game with stupid amounts of lines for your protagonist.

The storyline that you spend around all these amazing characters is, unfortunately, pretty cookie-cutter. There's a whole in the sky spewing demons, you are the one who can stop it, do the Inquisition, get your allies, fight the bad guy, win and blah blah blah. Fortunately, whilst the broad strokes are pretty predictable, the actual details offer plenty of twists and turns. Every single story mission after the tutorial has some sort of interesting or memorable twist, be it having to navigate a web of politics in the above oft-mentioned Orlais court, things going wrong in unpredictable ways, or other things that would be too spoilery to include here.

When things do hit a big crescendo, it works fantastically. The fact that your party members are all such fantastic character means it brings forth the main theme of the story brilliantly: that of togetherness despite difference, of uniting against a threat greater than a single ability, culture, or way of thinking could vanquish by itself. You've brought people from all across Thedas together, and you fight together, putting aside all your differences, fears, and prejudices to overcome this insurmountable obstacle.

That's why I hate the fact that you're marked as being the only one able to do this, by the way. It just kind of puts a damper on that whole thing as soon as you remember.

I absolutely love a lot of the political discussion in this thing. The conflict between Mages and Templars is at its peak, and as such the game has a lot to say about the responsibility that comes with power, as well as the responsibility that comes to someone who gives you their trust. It's got a lot to say, in general, since it uses the various aspects of the Dragon Age world fantastically as allegories, and it explores a lot of interesting issues beyond just the main obvious one, delving into everything from the politics of power to the value of redemption.

The final thing to mention is how brilliantly cameos from previous games are used. They feel fairly natural, and maintain fanwank to a minimum. Leliana is a main character again, but she's not there as a nostalgia fountain, but as a genuine character, with a whole new arc. Varric is there, and is frankly underutilized, but that's fine. There's a few other characters that feel like there's a genuine reason for them to be there, and like they've changed in significant but believable ways, far from Liara changing into a completely different character for no apparent reason between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.

So, if you've been reading very carefully, there's a possibility you might have gathered that I like the story and characters this game has to offer. But what about the game itself, the process of playing it, of kicking the assess of badies and punching dragons and setting zombies on fire?

That's alright, too.

Dragon Age Inquisition plays like a weird hybrid of the first Dragon Age with the second, with a little bit of World of Warcraft thrown in there for good measure. Its exploration feels very much like an MMO, with you running around big, open areas, seeking out quest givers that then send you to do a thing and you then return to the quest givers and they give you EXP and a thing. There's also about a million side activities and collectibles in each area: closing Fade Rifts, setting up Inquisition camps, collecting shards, claiming landmarks... It's important to mention right now how gorgeous all these areas look. They look lived in when they need to be, and wild and mysterious when that's called for. Characters also look fantastic, except for my player character. She looks a bit weird.

I'm not a particular fan of MMOs, so it's lucky that my principal complaint with them is solved: combat is actually fun, and not an exercise in tediously tacking turns to unsatisfyingly whack your opponent. This is the part that feels like a hybrid between Origins and DAII, landing somewhere between them in terms of tactical and slow and brainless and fast. The best thing is that it's up to you how you want to play.

You can play in real time, controlling one character from a behind-the-character camera, and firing off abilities whenever they're available. I found this fairly satisfying, as the animations are nice and meaty, and there's still a decent amount of strategy you can try to pull off, maximizing your DPS. You can also pause and go into tactical, overhead camera, where you choose between your characters and instruct them where to move and what to do, which they execute once you unpause. This is satisfying in a very different way, where overcoming a challenge by properly controlling the situation and reacting to changes in the correct way can feel really good.

That said, it's really a matter of difficulty. Playing in real time on Hard difficulty will result in a lot of going back to camp to heal, whilst playing in tactical mode on Normal will feel like you're wasting your time and effort, since even playing in real time is a breeze. This means you're pretty much committed to one playstyle on each difficulty setting, which is unfortunate: I was hoping Normal would allow me to play in real time for small encounters, but force me to play tactically against bosses and such. I ended up playing most of the game on Normal mode, but this was because I couldn't be bothered to switch too often, and I've not been a massive fan of the Dragon Age brand of tactical combat ever since Origins.

There's plenty of character customization as to how you'll whack your enemies. You get to choose from three classes at the beginning, Rogue, Warrior, and Mage, with Rogue and Warrior both having two different weapon types to choose from. Mages are instead stuck with just staffs, but they have several schools of magic to mix and match from, each with their own focus and playstyle.

When you level up, you gain an ability point, which you can put into an active or passive ability. These are all fairly powerful, and really do change the way you approach fights. This is good, because that's all you get from level ups: you never get to modify your stats directly, like in previous games. On the one hand, that's probably good, because you could create some really, really broken Rogue builds in Dragon Age II with very little effort (I created a Hawke with ridiculously high crit chance with two really fast weapons and an absurd crit modifier that meant every fight was over within 15 seconds on my first playthrough, with no guides), and your actual stats seem to work almost exactly the same way. On the other, this means that your leveling is even less in-depth than in the already too-simple-for-my-taste Dragon Age II. The fact that levels take ages to come in too doesn't really help.

A nice little bit of variety comes in around the midgame, when you unlock the ability to gain a specialization, an extra skill tree with generally more powerful abilities on it. These nicely shake up the way your character plays. For instance, whilst I'd centered my mage around weakening resistances and then setting up damage over time with the Storm and Fire schools of magic from a distance, I became a Knight-Enchanter, which gives you a powerful arcane blade to strike enemies up-close with that charges its own damage with damage from other spells, as well as a variety of buffs to barriers, short-term health buffs that mages can create. This meant that my playstyle shifted to one where I'd focus on charging my arcane blade, using a dash ability to get in the middle of a group, attack with my blade, and then having to decide whether to retreat and play defensively until my blade was charged again or set up a barrier and weather the storm close to my enemies.

There's plenty of little systems that you'd think would make the character customization quite deep. There's a whole crafting system, with the crafting of components from ingredients you find in the wild to modify your armor and weapons, as well as a whole mess of upgrades for your potions. These are... adequate. Finicky as these systems tend to be, but not particularly necessary. I almost ignored it on Normal, and did fine even for the few hours at a time I switched to Hard. Still, I can imagine on higher difficulties it could be quite helpful, and if one enjoys that kind of thing it may be worth your while on Normal (One of the few times I ventured into the system I managed to create an absolutely insane staff that did as much DPS as Warrior weapons. This means that with my really powerful mage abilities boosting my DPS considerably, I had stupidly high damage output).

There's also a whole alchemy system where you can upgrade your potions, find more, and so on. That did seem completely worthless, since my healing potions healed me completely without any upgrades, and all other potions were really powerful without any upgrades. I suspect if one bothered to craft fantastic weapons and get potions upgraded to the max, one might be able to create a build as broken as some of the Dragon Age II ones.

One little detail that does work is the Influence mechanic. As you do things you gain Influence, which levels up the Inquisition. Each level allows you to get an Inquisition perk, which are genuinely powerful and useful things, such as more inventory space, more dialogue options, or obtaining a collection of schematics. They feel like milestones, like you're growing your Inquisition, all the more so since they happen more rarely than your levels, and feel powerful in a different way.

The final big mechanic is one of the ones that held the most promise to me, and that I found the most disappointing: The War Table mechanic, which goes hand in hand with the Power mechanic. As you do things on the battlefield such as close Rifts or claim camps, you gain a resource called Power. You can then spend this Power to open up new areas or story missions.

That's kind of it. There's this whole War Table thing, where you're able to assign your advisers to carry out several tasks, with their approaches differing on the tasks. I got really excited about these two mechanics: The War Table would be where you'd go out to use the Power you gained to do things for the Inquisition, to improve Thedas, and steel against the demon menace. If you made bad decisions, you'd loose Power, which would mean you couldn't prevent disasters, and there'd be this whole cool thing...

Nope. You can only ever gain Power, unless you're using it to unlock a new thing. The War Table can never produce negative results. If you make a mistake, it's just a neutral result, with no rewards. The rewards you get are also really lame. You'll get a bit of Power, or a few dozen gold coins that you can use to not buy much. There's a few operations on the War Table that do produce significant results, but there's no way to foul these up, you'll always get the thing you want. This makes both of these mechanics feel really boring and lame. It's a shame, because there's a real power struggle in the story missions you go through, and I wish that was extended mechanically to some extent.



Verdict:
Presentation: 10/10
My second 10/10 in Presentation in a row. Am I getting soft, or is it just that both Banner Saga and Inquisition are absolutely fantastic? I'm pretty sure it's that second one. Inquisition is the game BioWare's been trying to make since EA bought them when it comes to presentation. Not only does it look gorgeous, but it's got a fantastic cast of characters, and a bunch of great story missions. It explores the world of Dragon Age fantastically, adding a bunch of depth to Southern Thedas. Some of the dynamics it explores, in particular the whole Mage/Templar thing are also really cool. There's just really very little to criticize. Inquisition did everything I wanted it to and more.

It also has the Iron Bull in it.

Gameplay: 8/10
Inquisition has a tonne to do, and you can do it in a variety of fun ways. The combat is satisfying, but a lot of the other systems aren't really relevant on Normal difficulty, though they're perfectly fine if you're interested in them. Exploration is satisfying, and scratches that MMO skinner box itch without the combat being dull as hell. Besides, these areas are really pretty, and their history is really cool.

Overall: 18/20
               9/10

This is my favorite BioWare game since they were bought out by EA, and I love a lot of what they've done since then, more than most people seem to. The world just captured my imagination in a way nothing really has for a long time, and I absolutely loved the characters. I really want to spend more time with them. It's a fantastic follow up to both of its prequels. It genuinely feels like a good pay off to having Dragon Age II be such a specific small thing. I cannot express how happy I am at this being a proper BioWare game. It's one of those situations where I wish I was just grading on one of the two parameters above, because this is a game I wish I could give a 10/10 to, despite my system. It's this kind of stuff that makes me want to get rid of my system altogether.

I might just do that to give this and Persona 4 a 10.

The Banner Saga - A Feeling of Dredge

Hey, a proper review! Also a post I might actually post instead of just leaving it half-finished as a draft. Or maybe not. Who knows? I'm also trying a different format, more similar to my anime reviews, where instead of having two distinct sections I have one section with two scores at the end.

The Banner Saga is the first "proper" game I've played in a while, mostly because the natural stopping points in episodic adventure games is a really nice thing to have when you're a uni student with basically no time for gaming. It's one of those games that I've had a mild interest in since it came out, but never really got around to playing. Well, it was cheap at some point, and wound up on my ever-growing list of Steam games I'm not really playing. So, getting some time over the Christmas holidays to play something, I pretty much picked a name out of a hat, and found myself playing The Banner Saga, the curious little hybrid of Visual Novel, The Oregon Trail, and turn-based top-down strategy game with vikings.

What a pleasant little surprise for the end of the year.

On With The Review:

There's no two ways about it. The Banner Saga looks abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous. Everything about it looks breathtaking in one way or another. The character portraits during conversation look fantastic. The scenery in the Oregon Trail-style travelling sections has depth, and detail, and is simply beautiful. The animation during the turn-based combats was rotoscoped, a technique that gives them a fantastic, fluid feeling similar to games like the original Prince of Persia or Another World.

All of this is backed by a phenomenal soundtrack that really fits the ambiance the game creates. This is a somber series of tracks that immerse you into this world. They almost feel like songs of mourning for this tired, dying world.

And that is what The Banner Saga does best. The world is dying. The Gods are dead. The sun has stopped moving, plunging the world into an eternal winter, and an army of stone golems called the Dredge are sweeping the land, destroying every settlement in their way, taking no prisoners, slaughtering everyone. You take the role of several power-figures throughout the land, whether human or of the horned giants called the Varl, trying to lead their people to escape from the tide of death that seems to be sweeping down from every direction. You're not trying to stop the world from dying, you're just trying to scrape a few more miserable months of life for those you are responsible for. That's it, and the story never really goes much more complex than that. There's a couple effective but highly predictable character arcs, and the rest is pretty much discussing the nitty-gritty of how to survive that particular moment.

I'm tempted to call The Banner Saga a horror game. Not because it's scary, or has any of the aesthetics typically associated with the genre, but because it so masterfully creates what I think is most important in a good horror game: dread. Throughout most of The Banner Saga, what one feels isn't terror, or fear, or even sadness, an emotion that one would probably associate with the end of the world (though Banner Saga definitely has its share of sad moments). It's just a quiet, creeping sense of dread and resignation.

There's plenty of time for this feeling to set in during the Oregon Trail segments. These consist of watching as your caravan slowly trudges along the beautiful yet barren world, with a day counter ticking up, and a "days of supplies" counter ticking down. Once that "day of supplies" number hits zero, your population starts to die off. At first, this baffled me. Why all these mildly long pauses where one essentially stares at the screen? Why not just move on to the next event, and be done with it? 

As I got farther into the game, I understood the purpose. These are genuinely tense times. You're sitting there, staring at the screen, torn between your wish for something to happen, and the fear that something happening may not be good for the people in your caravan. Maybe I'll come across an abandoned wagon of supplies, and not have to save my resources to buy supplies at the next town! Or maybe I'll get ambushed by Dredge, and loose a large amount of civilians. Oh, a town in the distance! I hope it's safe. I hope I can get cheap supplies there. Maybe there's a nice amulet I can buy in the market, make my fighters more efficient, protect my civilians from Dredge.

But, in the back of your mind, you know it doesn't matter. This world is done for, and so are you, and so is everyone in your caravan.

The "events" I described take place in almost FTL-style encounters, where you're presented with a few choices to make. Unlike FTL, the results of these choices aren't randomized (or, on a first playthrough, they sure as hell don't feel randomized). There's often a correct choice to be picked, though sometimes there's just a least bad or most good option to try to find. 

A decision that does still baffle me is to include no game-over state through the Oregon Trail sections. As I found out by trying it simple to see, if you population hits zero, nothing happens, meaning you can pretty much ignore your supply situation and your population, which makes the choices you make in the FTL-encounters a lot less stressful. Admittedly, it's fairly easy to never run out of supplies, and you've got more than enough population to never run out without actively trying to, but it's still a bit of a damper. That said, playing as though population mattered made the atmosphere of the game all the more effective for me, so I did.

The final thing to discuss are the battle sections, which in my opinion are the weakest part of the game. That said, when the weakest part of the game is The Banner Saga's combat sections, you're doing pretty damn well, because the combat in The Banner Saga is very good.

It's pretty much standard top-down tiled-based turn-based word-hyphen combat, with a twist or two thrown in there. You get to bring a team of six characters, leveled from one to five. You then proceed to take turns moving your guys around and whacking the opponents, with one move and one action per character. One of the cleverer things is that there's two types of health each characters has: armor, and strength, and you get to decide which one to attack at every turn. Strength is your actual "Hit points", the stuff that gets your character knocked out when it goes to 0. However, your remaining strength also serves as your attack power. If you try to attack a character's strength, the resulting damage is your strength minus their armor, to a soft cap of 1 if their armor is higher, though at that point you've got a chance to miss. Attacking their armor doesn't bring them closer to death, but does allow you to do strength damage on further attacks. Each character hits armor for a set amount based off one of their stats.

This brings a really interesting dynamic to fights. On the one hand, it might be better to attack strength straight off. This means they're going to hit you for less on your own strength, so you can stay further away from death and do more damage. On the other hand, if you hit them for armor damage now, your other characters can close in and finish them off quicker.

The other main mechanic in fights is willpower. Each character has a certain amount of willpower, which are points that you can use to essentially give your characters a little bit of kick on the battlefield. You can move farther, or hit for more, even overriding their armor to hit for more than one when you've got considerably less strength than they have armor. The amount of willpower you can use per attack also varies with stats. You can also use special abilities, unique to the handful of character classes in the game, which each cost one willpower each. These will allow you to push enemies around the battlefield, make your allies automatically attack an enemy you've marked when it's not their turn, hit several enemies, or other useful little things. It's an interesting conflict, having to decide whether the situation is dire enough to sacrifice your last bit of hitting extra.

Each time a character gets a kill on the battlefield, the game remembers this. Getting to specific numbers of kills allows you to rank up, which uses up certain amounts of renown. Renown is the currency of the game. It's used for everything, whether to buy supplies or level up your guys. Every kill on the battlefield gives you 1 renown, as well as completing battles successfully or acts of kindness or bravery on the road. This means there's yet another interesting dynamic: Do you level up your warriors, thus being able to more effectively protect your civilians in the battlefield, or do you buy supplies, and prevent your caravan from starving?

The leveling system itself is also brilliant, yet simple. Every point you put in a stat is a stat you directly see on the battlefield. There isn't any "put a point into charisma so that there's a 3.2% reduction in your spell costs, but only if they're white magic and we're not going to tell you any of that". A point in strength means you get an extra point of strength in combat. A point of armor break means your attacks now break one more armor. It's all a direct one-to-one correspondence without loosing any depth, which feels very refreshing.

The combination of all these factors makes combat a series of interesting decisions. Do I level my guys, or try to squeak by with weaker warriors so that it's less likely my civilians will starve? Do I attack strength now, setting up for a slower kill, or do I attack armor, and risk taking a bit hit? Do I use the last of my tank's willpower to get up to that Dredge over there, or can my archers afford to kite him for a while?

Presentation: 10/10
The Banner Saga looks great, sounds great, and has an effective story. Above all, it's an absolute masterpiece of the grim, quiet, dread that darker Nordic-themed fantasy is so good at.

Gameplay: 8/10
While maybe lacking depth in some aspects, The Banner Saga's gameplay seems to consist mostly of interesting and difficult choices, whether it be in combat or outside it. This is something I'm down for.

Overall:
 (10+8)/2 = 9

The Banner Saga is fantastic. It does everything it wants to do well, and it's not exactly an unambitious project. Go play it.

What is Number?

I use scores in my reviews. I do this despite believing that scores are generally a bad thing for reviewers to put in their reviews, because this is a blog I do for purely fun and I enjoy grading things on a numerical scale. The fact that no one visits it means that it's fairly safe for me to put these scores up. However, recently, I've realized that perhaps it'd be good to clarify exactly what a number on my scale means. Please note, that, despite a 5 being an alleged average product, my reviews likely average way higher than a 5. In fact, I don't remember giving an overall score lower than a 5 since I started this blog. This is because I play games that I expect to enjoy and have reason to believe are good. The same applies to watching anime. I am not a professional reviewer, and as such I still consume media with my own entertainment as the primary goal, so I avoid things I don't enjoy as much as possible.

So, what do scores mean? Obviously, there's slight differences in their meaning from category to category, but the general idea goes as follows:

0 - Trash
Absolute, unbearable trash. Nothing of worth at all. Painful in every way, and actively pushes me away from wanting to experience this thing. I never expect a review to make use of this rating, since I'll certainly give up on something that deserves this in any category in mere minutes.

1 - Despicable
I hate this. I despise it with every fiber of my being. I certainly don't want to experience any more of it, but at least it doesn't actively seem to be designed to repel me. As above, I never expect a review to make use of this rating.

2 - Awful
It's truly unpleasant. It makes it hard to enjoy in any way shape or form. However, there's at least something here that bears a semblance of good. Be it at least an indication that the developer tried, or a single decent idea buried beneath a mountain of shit, I can see something that I may have liked in another reality. Yet another rating that I would be very surprised to ever actually use, though it's not completely ruled out.

3 - Bad
Obviously not good. It's got glaring flaws that absolutely ruin the experience in many ways, and they're certainly a lot more notable than anything good. However, there are a few good things in there that might occasionally become apparent. This is as low a score as I ever realistically expect to give, and even then it seems unlikely I'd stick with it.

4 - Upsetting
Perhaps my least favorite rating. There's things here that I like, but its flaws are massive. Too massive. I can't see the good points behind the bad, and that's upsetting, because its obvious there are good points there. I really want to like this aspect of whatever I'm reviewing, but I just can't.

5 - Tepid
Doesn't leave me particularly moved one way or the other. It's not something I noticed whilst consuming this piece of media, in either a good or bad way. It works and doesn't get in the way, but it's not impressive either. It's just kind of there, and that's fine, I guess.

6 - Fine
There's a couple positive things here that left an impression. However, they're either not particularly impressive, or there's also a few fairly large flaws that make it hard to be too enthusiastic about it. I like this, but it's not anything to write home about by any means.

7 - Good
Definitely worthwhile. Either there's just good, solid stuff here, or there's some really high-quality material somewhat hidden beneath large flaws. I may not be spreading the word about how good this is to everyone I meet, but if I know it lines up with someone's interests I'll definitely be recommending it.

8 - Great
Really impressive. The base here is really, really good, with either a bunch of small annoyances or a couple large ones. Still, it's difficult to really care when there's such obviously good stuff there.

9 - Fantastic
Next to perfect. There's a lot of phenomenal material here, possibly tarnished by a few minor flaws. For something with this as an average, I'll likely rave and rant about it for weeks, recommending it to anyone that will listen.

10 - The Very Best
Absolutely momentous. A landmark for how to do this. It's not necessarily perfect, since no work of art is, but the flaws are so minor you either have to have a sharper eye than me to notice them, or they only come up in retrospect. Will likely become a kind of gold standard to be measured against for works of its genre in the future, at least on this blog.



I also use half-points. These can mean one of two things: either not quite good enough to have the rating above, or just a bit too good for the rating below. When I give a half point both of these reasons usually come up simultaneously, but occasionally I'll give a certain ranking, feel uncomfortable, and increase or reduce it by a half point. In these cases I try to make it clear which of the two happened, since something that barely wasn't good enough to be a 7 is better than something that was just slightly better than a 6. I could move to using quarter-points for those particular cases, but they result in ugly and inelegant scores, which I would much rather avoid.

There's also two scales that aren't quite 0-10: the 0-5 scale I use for the Presentation category for anime, and the 0-15 scale that I use for Enjoyment for anime. The 0-5 scale is more of a "Take points off for every flaw" deal, since I don't really care about how good an anime looks or sounds. That's the reason why the scale is from 0-5, so that it has less of an impact on the overall score since Presentation is a way less important category. The 0-15 scale can be fairly safely translated to 0-10, by dividing by 1.5 and rounding appropriately though the explanations above may not make that much sense when rating enjoyment. Much like with Presentation, I only really use the 0-15 scale because I think Enjoyment is the most important category.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger - Joyous Storytelling

Oh, baby, a game review! It's good to be back.

I like those sort of AA games, you know the kind I'm talking about. Stuff that is most definitely not indie, but hasn't really got the full brunt of a AAA developer behind it. I find it's usually a bite-sized piece of extremely polished fun, and a lot of hidden gems come out of that particular marketplace. I'd heard a lot of things about Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, the latest installment in the much maligned Call of Juarez series, and it had been on my radar ever since TotalBiscuit's WTF is... on the game, which showed it to be a fun arcadey shooter with a lot of personality. I had fairly high expectations for the thing, but, even then, it surpassed them.

Presentation:
Gunslinger's main gimmick lies in the presentation department: The framing device for the story sees Silas Greaves, an old bounty hunter, walking into a tavern and telling tall tales about his deeds to a few of the locals. It's a fairly charming idea on its own, but what's brilliant is its implementation into the gameplay: not only are we treated to an almost Bastion-style narration by Silas, as well as the occasional piece of dialogue with those around him, but Silas' storytelling actively affects the world around you: Pieces of scenery will pop into existence as he mentions them, the story will rewind as he remembers things wrong and corrects himself, or the action will slow down as Silas gets distracted by chatting with the people around him.

This works great as a gimmick, lending the game a huge amount of charm. The whole game is as much Silas telling his story as it is him over-fantasizing certain elements, and it serves as a subtle nod to the power of storytelling. As a result of fantastic voice-acting from Silas and company (with what little dialogue happens in-story being narrated by Silas as part of his story), as well as really fantastic writing, the game oozes atmosphere. This thing is full of that Western movie feel, which I was very happy about, because it's an aesthetic that games have severely underutilized.

Silas' tale is very well told, too, starting as what seems like a bunch of disconnected little adventures that soon build up into a larger plot. There's just enough of a through-thread to keep one interested without ruining each level's individual story and pacing. The only disappointment comes at the very end, which throws a twist at the player that's both extremely predictable and pointless, and wraps the story up annoyingly quick after, without giving a feeling of proper resolution. It doesn't ruin what's been a very fun tale up to that point, but it does leave one with an unfortunately sour taste in their mouth to finish the adventure.

The solid story is backed up by really charming visuals: gameplay takes place in a very stylized world, effectively using a comic-book style to convey the action. The only issue is that things can occasionally look too busy, making it hard to see enemies. Cutscenes at the start of every chapter, taking place in the tavern where Silas is recounting his story, instead look a lot "harder", if that makes any sense, than the gameplay, though are still very stylish. The only thing that feels slightly out of place are the boss-introduction strips, looking like something straight out of a comic-book. Whilst this theoretically meshes well with the in-engine stuff, there's an odd disconnect there. Still, these rarely come up, once a chapter at most, and as such are pretty harmless.

The whole package is backed up by an extremely Western-feeling soundtrack, which does a good job of even further giving the game its Wild West ambiance. Action scenes in particular stand out, getting appropriately bombastic tunes to get your blood pumping.

Presentation Verdict: 

9.5/10

There's not a lot to say about Gunslinger's presentation because it's just so damn good. The game looks and sounds great, and has a simple but entertaining story to boot. A couple small but important flaws hold it back from a perfect score, but you'd be hard pressed to find yourself caring too much.

Gameplay:
As one would expect, Gunslinger is a first-person shooter, though it takes a much more arcadey approach than most games in its genre nowadays. Aside from a few difficulty spikes, dispatching your enemies is typically fairly easy, with the real challenge coming from looking good whilst doing it. Several sorts of trick-shots get rewarded with extra points, from the basic headshot, to shots piercing through light cover, to the extremely hard to pull off ricochet shot. To boot, as you kill enemies in quick succession, you'll build up a combo multiplier, where each subsequent kill in the chain will grant you more points. Keep in mind, however, the combo multiplier doesn't actually directly grant that times as many points: a times two headshot will get you 150 points, whereas a normal headshot awards you 100 points.

This is a fairly fun incentive to play the game differently, and a lot of the different weapons promote going for different strategies to maximize points: If you're dual-wielding revolvers you'll want to get a lot of low-point kills to build your combo up high, hopefully finishing your chain off with a more stylish kill, whereas if you're taking enemies out from a distance with a rifle you'll be focusing more on making each individual kill give you as many points as possible without being that bothered about your combo. This, as well as the fact that every gun feels great to shoot, makes up for the fact that there really aren't that many weapons in the game: there are four sorts of pistols and three sorts of rifles, as well as dynamite. You're only ever allowed one type of pistol (which you can gain the ability to dual-wield very early in the game) and one type of rifle at the same time, which is slightly disappointing, but the game is short enough that you won't have time to get bored of the limited number of possible loadouts.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the points system is that there simply aren't enough types of trick-shots. Most of the time you'll only really be scoring headshots, since most of the other ones are too dependent on enemy behavior: you need an enemy to be behind light cover for a piercing shot, you need an enemy to be running for a runner bonus, and so on. This means that going in close and personal is very much encouraged, which I personally enjoy, but might be disappointing for those preferring to play a more patient game.

Of course, the points you obtain from level to level aren't only for bragging rights (though the games online leaderboards make bragging rights a very relevant aspect), they're also used to level up your character. You can get several upgrades that make fighting easier for you, divided up into three skill trees: Desperado (based around dual-wielding pistols), Ranger (based around rifles and accuracy), and Trapper (based around shotguns and getting in close). I'm in two minds about these: for a long time, it felt as though my upgrades were doing very little to help, but by the end of the game I really felt like the things I'd bought early on were now doing a good deal to help me keep my combo up. However, one defect of the system is that the more powerful abilities are locked away quite high-up the skill trees (aside from the first ability in each tree, which are arguably the three most useful abilities in the game), meaning you're strongly encouraged to stick on one tree until you've finished it.

This means that you're quite limited to what approaches you can take. Whilst you can do alright with a rifle from the very start, shotguns and dual pistols are very hard to effectively use without dying until you pretty much fill out their trees. In my playthrough, I got completely through the Desperado tree and about halfway through the Ranger, putting one or two points into Trapper along the way, meaning I was pretty much locked into dual pistols if I wanted to get decent scores on the last few levels. Whilst it's satisfying to feel uber-powerful as you mow down hordes of enemies with dual pistols in the later levels, it's disappointing that I was pretty much forced to ignore any shotgun I found. I just wish the baseline for dual pistols and shotguns was more in range with the baseline for rifles: reasonable, just not as godlike as you'd want.

Of course, there's also a few twists here and there. In the presentation section, I mentioned how Silas' tale affects the gameworld, and this makes for a very entertaining experience. You never quite know how any given encounter is going to be modified by Silas' storytelling, meaning there's always an element of the unexpected. Some of the more entertaining levels involve replaying parts of the level with different approaches, as Silas changes his story for one reason or another. This means that, although levels tend to be fairly small and linear, there's always something interesting around the corner. You're also encouraged to explore by the Nuggets of Truth, collectible items that give you a bunch of experience as well as a small bit of information on the real-life version of an event or a person mentioned in the game, which I found fairly interesting reading.

Aside from this, the game also has two fairly cool mechanics: as you kill enemies, you'll build up your concentration gauge, which allows you to briefly go into concentration mode (read: bullet-time), where the game will slow down, your enemies will be highlighted, and you'll get the fairly valuable "Eyeblink" skillshot on every enemy you kill. This initially seems like a rather tired mechanic, which we've seen in several games before, but as you level up you'll unlock more interactions with concentration that make it a joy to work it into comboes: for instance, you can get a Desperado unlock that fully reloads your guns as soon as you enter concentration, meaning you can negate reload times, which are a big enemy of getting your combo multiplier up high. Combine this with any of the numerous other insane concentration-upgrading unlocks, and you're in business.

The other signature mechanic of the game's main component is Sense of Death: as you play the game, you'll fill up a Sense of Death gauge. Once this is full, if you're about to take a killing shot, the game will slow down and focus on the bullet coming at you, which you can dodge to either the left or right: essentially a mini-quick-time-event without a prompt. A successful dodge will result in your Sense of Death gauge emptying, Silas regaining a small bit of his health, and enemies around you being vocally surprised at your apparently miraculous feat, giving you a tiny bit of time to start making a comeback. It seems like a fairly small mechanic, and I originally thought of it as pointless, but I found myself really appreciating it as I got to some of the harder levels: it makes for some truly badass moments of recovery from a seemingly unwinnable position, and fuels that movie "lone cowboy vs the world" feel very effectively.

So, the main component of the game is an entertaining, if simple shooter. The main problem comes in the boss fights, of which there are two types: in-game shootouts and duels. Shootouts put you in the typical gameplay engine, where you're fighting against a powerful enemy with a health bar. These typically occur in an arena of some kind, with the boss either moving around the edges or sitting at a set position and firing at you, as well as calling in waves of goons. The problem is, these aren't very entertaining. Aside from one fight that breaks the mold and has you come up against a powerful gun-toting foe that runs around the arena just like you, these fights boil down to "wait for the boss to pop up/have a break in his firing pattern, then shoot him". Considering how the game is designed for lightning fast, run-and-gun action, this just isn't fun. Some bosses outright have gatling guns, which the loading screens instruct you to wait for breaks in fire with, and these are by far the low points of the game.  What's particularly frustrating is when the game forces you to use dynamite on a boss: dynamite, despite taking up a fourth of the weapon select wheel, is next to useless in normal combat due to how small its explosion radius is, and how difficult it is to accurately throw. The boss that sits in an armored gatling gun and forces you to throw dynamite at him was my least favorite encounter of the game.

The other type of boss fight is the duel. This tries to capture the classic feel of Wild West dueling, but doesn't really succeed. You and your opponent stare each other down, and you're made to juggle two indicators: your focus, which you do by keeping a wide reticle on your opponent and zooms you in, making for an easier shot, and your draw speed, which you do by tapping A and D to keep your hand close to your gun. The issue is, after playing the whole game, I still haven't been able to figure out how draw speed works: it seems to arbitrarily decide whether my speed will increase without me doing anything, or what direction I have to push to make it increase otherwise (though A seems to work a lot more often than D).

After a while, you hear a heartbeat sound, indicating that you're ready to shoot. Shortly after, your opponent will draw their gun and shoot at you. You've got two options: waiting for the opponent to draw before you shoot, resulting in an honorable kill that nets you a decent amount of points, or shooting before your opponent does anything, resulting in a dishonorable kill that nets you no points. The issue is that it's too easy to get an honorable kill because of the heartbeat sound. The idea behind the duel system is that you'll be juggling adjusting your two parameters and watching the opponent's hand. Pay too much attention to parameters, and you'll wind up not noticing you're getting shot, pay too much attention to your opponent and your draw will be slow and hard to aim. The problem is that, after the introduction of the heartbeat mechanic (which happens very early on), no opponent shoots before you hear the heartbeat indicator, meaning you're safe to focus completely on maximizing your advantage before then. By the time the heartbeat plays, you're pretty much guaranteed to have enough focus and draw speed to be able to win if you wait for them to draw first. This means that duels are almost never tense.

Also, despite the fact that the last few duels have a few extra gimmicks thrown in, dueling is just not particular fun. Even at its best, it feels like an annoying slow-paced balancing act that's getting in the way of the shooty shooty bang bang fun. I appreciate the idea behind the mechanic, but, even as rare as it is (there's either no duel or one duel every chapter, with a total of fourteen chapters), I got tired of it by the end.

Fourteen chapters may not seem like that much, especially considering each chapter is only about twenty minutes long, but I felt the game ended pretty much on queue. You spend just enough time at a very high power level to feel satisfied, and the game's just long enough to not outstay its welcome. I beat Gunslinger in about 4 hours, and felt like I got just enough of what the game had to offer to be happy. I'll actively praise Gunslinger for lasting exactly as long as it did.

Gameplay Verdict: 

8/10

Gunslinger is a lot of fun to play. It's fast, it feels good, and it's got a good amount of style. There's just enough there to keep you having a blast for the four hours the game lasts, and you'll leave feeling good about yourself. There's a few unfortunate flaws in what's otherwise a really good gameplay experience, but the game's short enough that they don't have time to become major annoyances.

Overall Verdict:

(9.5+8)/10
8.75/10

Gunslinger is a truly joyous game. It's got a lot of personality and charm in its presentation, and it's a blast to play. It highlights what gaming can do do differentiate itself from other artforms in its storytelling, whilst it reminds you just how much fun a good shooter can be. For its low price, Gunslinger is more than worth trying out, even if it is over quite quickly.

Anime Review: Free! - SWIMMING DRAMA DUBSTEP

It's summer. I'm in the blissful period before my grades come in, where I can kick back, forget that I'm a uni student, and just do stuff. As such, I found myself with a lot of free time, and what better to do with this time than watch anime and play videogames?

After watching the fantastic Daria twice (which, despite not being anime, I started to write a thing about and found myself with writers block), beating Dark Souls (review coming eventually), almost 100%ing Bully and playing through most of Dark Souls II, I remembered that I hadn't watched anime in ages, and as such, on impulse, randomly picked an anime off of my to-watch list and went through the whole thing in one day.

I'm not sure how Free! ended up on said list. It seems to be a combinations of genres I don't like. It's very much a shoujo (translation for the unintiated: girl anime, this being for, not necessarily about, girls), and I am not, as it happens, a shoujo. It's also a sports anime, specifically a swimming anime. I'm not a sporty guy, and, as far as sports go, swimming is one of my least favorites (largely due to a pretty awful coach for several years in my childhood).

I won't lie, Free! doesn't make a good first impression. The first episode is an awful slog, with tonnes of cliches happening all around the place for no appropriate reason, and a lot of the characters coming across as bland. I almost quit watching right there and then, but decided to give it a second chance and watched the second episode, which was considerably better.

As one would expect, Free! follows a high-school swimming team, made up of four members, who, as the show for some reason makes a gleeful point of pointing out, all have girly names. The closest we have to a protagonist is the star of the team, the quiet and standoffish Haruka, who has a bizarre fascination with being in water.

Haruka himself is one of the biggest issues with the show. Most of the time, he just seems unpleasant. He's really insistent about the fact that "I only swim free", which gets to be really annoying, and, until the final two episodes, doesn't seem to justify the affection that everyone else seems to feel for him in any way. He's mopey, picky, standoffish, and just a downer to have around. There's a few mildly funny gags where a couple of his obsessions are made fun of, but that's unfortunately the highlight of his character.

The rest of the team, thankfully, does a lot better. There's the captain and backstroke specialist Makoto, who comes across very much as a gentle giant, friendly and understanding, as well as acting as the emotional backbone of the team. There's also Nagisa, the resident jokester and beam of sunlight, whose relentless energy and positive attitude originally annoyed me, but very quickly grew on me (he actually eerily reminds me of Persona 4's Teddie in that way), as well as Rei, the new guy who actually goes through a fairly effective (if oft used) arc, starting off as the cold logic guy and eventually turning out to be one of the people most in touch with the emotions of those around him. The supporting cast, (namely the team's manager Gou/Kou, the coach, and the teacher sponsoring the team) are actually some of the better characters, with their support for the team feeling genuinely heartfelt.

The plot is fairly barebones, as one would expect of a sports anime: Haruka, Makoto and Nagisa used to be on a team with Rin, another star swimmer. Rin left, he's now come back, and he's a jerkass obsessed with beating Haruka. What ensues is the new swim team going through a bunch of hurdles to compete against Rin, including setting up the team from the ground up, training, and a bunch of competitions. Eventually, the four of the old team members reconcile and learn that what really matters in competition is the power of friendship after all.

It's not precisely groundbreaking, but it works well, and it allows a few fairly tense moments to happen. The show's biggest hindrance is the sport it focuses on - the writing does do a really good job of setting up these tense situations, with a lot more than just a medal being on the line for the characters, but the payoff is never not disappointing. The swimming scenes are never more than a few seconds long, and consist of an animation just looping over and over whilst people yell in the background. The most intense these get is in one of the final confrontations, when Rin and Haruka get red and blue (respectively) backgrounds with speedlines.

The other big hurdle the show fails to satisfyingly jump over is Rin. If he was supposed to be a downright unlikeable jerk, then the show's done a great job, but he's actually supposed to be an old friend of the teams, and as I said, they end up reconciling by the end. There's also some tragic backstory about his dad clumsily tacked on, which leads me to believe he's meant to be at least mildly sympathetic. This does not work well. Rin seems like a genuine asshat, acts like a genuine asshat, and looks like a genuine asshat. The only times he's seen being nice to anyone are flashbacks to his childhood, and the very end of the series. The entire rest of the time he's making derisive comments to everyone, being both a sore winner and a sore looser, and just being a prick in general. This unfortunately ruins the emotional climax of the show, which is centered around him. Also, for some reason the artists decided to give him pointy teeth, which just goofy as fuck.

Rin's teeth stand out because this is a very good looking show. The characters are especially well drawn, which comes to no surprise as a large part of the show's appeal for its intended demographic is  supposedly the pretty buff boys in swimsuits. Whilst I'm not very attracted to that, I do have to say, those boys are really pretty, really buff, and those abs are very lovingly detailed. Fortunately, everything else is also very competently drawn, looking sharp and clear, with the water being especially impressively pretty.

The show has also got a pretty great soundtrack. Whilst the opening and ending themes are fairly generic, a lot of the music that plays throughout the show is genuinely great, though it tends to have issues with fitting what's going on on screen well, with goofy music occasionally playing over serious moments and viceversa. This is especially true of the one bizarre exception to the otherwise mostly instrumental music: the dubstep track. This is my favorite song on the soundtrack, not because I like dubstep (I enjoy how dumb it is, and that's about it), but because it almost feels like it was intentionally placed over inappropriate scenes, which resulted in me repeatedly laughing out loud as someone climbed out of a pool to intense wub-wubs.

Character and World Building:7 /10
The supporting cast is really great, with a considerable amount of both memorable and endearing characters. Unfortunately, the two main characters of Haruka and Rin are both boring and unlikeable, which brings the series down immensely.

Story: 5/10
It's there. The main drive behind the story is a relationship that's very much uninteresting, and the plot is one we've seen plenty of times, but it's done decently enough that it doesn't get in the way. The main appeal of the show is the moment-by-moment conflict, not the overarching plot, and that's usually driven enough by the characters I did like to be effective.

Presentation: 5/5
I can find no issue but Rin's teeth and that one dubstep track.

Enjoyment: 10/15
Despite a lot of the flaws, I did find myself immersed in the moment-to-moment drama, and the humor was often effective. Unfortunately, the constant downer that is Haruka, and the occasional unpleasantness that is Rin bring the show down a lot, and manage to drop the enjoyment rating by 4 just by themselves, with the anticlimatic swimming scenes nailing the coffin shut. If Haruka had acted the way he does in the final episodes through the whole series, this would likely have been considerably higher.

Overall: (7+5+5+10)/40
               27/40
               6.75/10

Despite it not being what I like, Free! did manage to hold my attention, and didn't feel like a waste of my time. It's got some very strong writing in the characters, but three very clearly defined fatal flaws that just divebombed my enjoyment of the whole ordeal. It's not something I'd recommend unless you're attracted to males and are into the typical sports formula, but if you are Free! is more than likely worth every second of its running time.

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun - Electrifying

The first thing one sees upon starting either of the two seasons of Toaru Kagaku no Railgun is a screen identifying it as an A Certain Magical Index side story. This is a massive injustice, and here's why:

As I concluded in my review, Toaru Majutsu no Index, or A Certain Magical Index in English, is a good show. Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, which translates to A Certain Scientific Railgun is not a good show. It's an absolutely breathtaking masterpiece.

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, which I will henceforth refer to as simply Railgun follows Misaka Mikoto, also known as The Railgun (no italics), a powerful Level 5 Esper in a few of her adventures throughout the futuristic Academy City, though it begins chronologically quite a bit before Index does. As I explained in my Index review, Espers are people with what are essentially science-based superpowers, ranked by Level from 0 (no Esper ability) to 5 (extremely powerful Esper ability), though talk of a Level 6 Esper becomes important in the second season of the show.

Something that I felt Index really squandered was the world it created. It did a good job of translating it to really entertaining battles, but we never really got to explore Academy City, the city of learning and science where most Espers congregate. Index was also a lot more focused on magic than Espers, which was another wasted opportunity. Railgun capitalizes on both of these in a big way. We not only get to explore Academy City, but Academy City becomes a major thematic force in the plot. Through the silly and fantastic concept of science-based superpowers, Railgun explores very serious and real issues of our current society. There's a lot of facets to it: The Level division is used as a metaphor for the division between the rich and poor, including the inclusion of those who are and are not able to improve their social status. Academy City itself is used to explore the impact of science on human society, in both its negatives and its positives, as well as the possible folly of good intentions, and the loss of perspective on the importance of human life.

A lot of what Railgun has to say has been said already, but its many heavy themes aren't obnoxious and in your face. In fact, at points I found myself not even sure if they were intentionally put there, since they're masterfully woven into the world, and seem like they're just a natural consequence of the way this world operates. And yet, in hindsight, I can see that that's utterly unlikely, and giving the writers of Railgun too little credit. Railgun is true sci-fi: It's using apparently ridiculous ideas to convey something really real in an organic way, and it doesn't ever grind the action to a halt to shove it in your face: The ideas are there for you to pick up on by yourself.

Another issues I had with Index was character development, in that there was barely any. The characters we got to see where very well-defined, but they didn't change at all throughout the course of the show. Railgun also nails this. Whilst it focuses on a significantly smaller cast, every single member of this cast has changed in some way by the end of the show. Admittedly, a few of these changes are a bit heavy-handed, falling in the pitfall that it so elegantly and seemingly effortlessly avoids when it comes to overarching themes of the show, but this doesn't mean they're not impactful. Railgun is centred around Misaka, her room mate Shirai, and their friends Uiharu and Saten.

Even in Index, where she got considerably less screen-time, I could tell Misaka was my favourite character, and she gets considerably better here. She is eminently likeable: short-tempered enough to be funny, noble enough to be admirable, and powerful enough to be fist-pumpingly cool. Even if Index's Touma did a surprisingly good job as protagonist, Misaka blows him out of the water. She's got plenty of character, and goes through more than one really good emotional arc, particularly the one spanning the entirety of the second season. I also like her constant appreciation of a lot of childish things, which is an extremely endearing trait, especially considering how mature she is otherwise.

Shirai, Misaka's room mate, is a powerful Level 4 Esper (fantastic control of her ability, teleportation) and works at Judgement, one of the two main policing organizations at Academy City, along with her friend Uiharu. Both of them are also in middle school. This was one of my more omnipresent issues: middle-schoolers seem to be accepted for police work for no particular reason, and don't seem to get any special education for it, outside of physical training. It doesn't seem like a particularly huge issue, but it constantly pulled me out of the show with just how little sense it makes. Sure, Shirai is shown to be a powerful Esper, but there's information that later in the show becomes vital to her survival that she only just learned in class. What if she was a year younger? It's established that she was in Judgement since elementary school, so it's lucky none of these crises came up before she'd learned about it in school or Academy City would be fucked. I just think the whole Judgement thing would work if it were portrayed as training for the other, proper, police organization, Anti-Skill, or even as a club Shirai and friends started Buffy style.

Stupid, non-sensical police organizations aside, Shirai is a fairly decent character. The running joke with her is that she's very infatuated with Misaka, and will often display her affection. Outside a few choice situations, it's not very funny, and often drags on for too long. Still, when things get serious Shirai is shown to be a very dependable and kind, if stubborn person. Her character arcs aren't particularly interesting, but they do have a couple very cathartic moments at the end which made me shed a few tears.

The weakest character of the main four is likely Uiharu, Shirai's companion at Judgement, and a weak Level 1 (Has power, but can barely use it) Esper. There's just not much to her. She's kind of bland: She's shy-ish... and very understanding? Also a hard worker and a bit of an idealist, I guess? To be fair, the show doesn't often really focus on her that much, and when it does it tends to work surprisingly well, often centred around her wish to help those who are vulnerable. It's a good thing, too, because I feel that any more Uiharu-centred content than we get would get quite old.

Last but definitely not least out of the main cast is Saten. I have trouble deciding whether Saten or Misaka is my favourite character in the Academy City universe. Saten is a Level 0 Esper, having absolutely no ability. She's an energetic and somewhat goofy girl, but is shown to be a very understanding person. She's got an absolutely brilliant arc in Season 1, but unfortunately falls to the wayside in this respect in Season 2, acting mostly as just a supporting character. Still, there's such a sense of benevolence emanating from her that I can't help but like her. She's a very human character, smart in many ways, stupid in many others.

Accompanying them is a fairly large set of side characters, though nowhere near the size of that in Index, meaning each side character also gets a fair amount of development. There's some really fantastic ones here: I really like the pompous but ultimately good-natured Kongou, as well as Shirai and Uiharu's boss Konori. To put the nail in the coffin, several of these side-characters randomly get an episode dedicated to them where the main cast take a backseat role, and these are some of the best episodes in the series. There's a few guest appearances by characters from Index, most notably Touma (who admittedly is way too important to be just a guest halfway through Season 2), though these usually feel pretty hollow and a bit pointless.

Both the characters and the world would go to waste without at least a decent story to back them up, and Railgun's story is more than decent. Both seasons are comprised of two arcs, each spanning about half the season. In Season 1, both these arcs eventually make up a complete story in two parts, whereas in Season 2 the connection between the arcs is more thematic than anything. This lends the story a much more coherent feel than Index's three bajillion arcs, and helps keep momentum throughout. Even more so, the way each arc is built is absolutely phenomenal, typically starting with the gang going on several seemingly disconnected adventures throughout their daily lives that ultimately turn out to be connected to a larger plot, eventually building to a climatic battle. These small adventures provide the down-time in between important plot bits: They range everywhere from having a hot pot to helping a woman find where she parked her car to catching a small-time criminal.

This kind of stuff was sorely missing from Index, and lent its version of Academy City a bit of hollowness. It seemed like a nice place, but we never spent much time just enjoying it. With Railgun, it's occasionally easy to forget you're watching an anime about people with super powers, with a few episodes feeling a lot more like something out of Katawa Shoujo than Index. It's fluff, pure and simple, and it's what lets us feel comfortable around the main characters, and what leads us to love Academy City and its people.

These disconnected adventures typically do have some amount of overall significance, though. Little plot threads are planted throughout each adventure, either small discrepancies that the characters notice or apparently irrelevant rumours, which helps keep a sense of momentum going. Once the larger story of the arc has kicked in, they'll become apparent as consequences of whatever mysterious plot is going on in Academy City. Things escalate very smoothly, and soon the stakes are extremely high, but it's never as jarring as it was in Index since this escalation is taking place across ten or so episodes, rather than one or two. By the end of each arc, things feel important, damnit, and the inevitable final showdown between Misaka and company and the villain dejour has a lot riding on it.

Which is why it's good that the action is so damn awesome. I did praise Index for its action scenes, but Railgun blows them out of the water. Misaka's powers are used in extremely creative ways, and she comes across more than one villain with really cool gimmicks. Despite her being established as the 3rd most powerful Esper in Academy City, and as such the world, Misaka's opponents never fail to pose a challenge, and it's often tough to see ways for her to defeat them. Fights here are more about out-thinking your opponent and exploiting holes in their defensive capability than about constant offence, which makes them very entertaining, and they often end in unexpected ways. However, the highlights of the action scenes are undoubtedly the end-of-arc scenes, often Misaka using her power in extremely visually impressive and creative ways, whilst the theme music for that arc blares in the background. I honestly couldn't help myself from cheering during these (or, in one occasion, shedding a few manly tears), since they often build on all the character development done throughout the arc, as well.

There are a few flaws in the story, however, the major one happening in Season 1: Between the two major arcs, there are a good few episodes where nothing really seems to be happening. They're enjoyable enough by themselves, but they don't have any of the foreshadowing that's usually cleverly implanted in the show, and as such feel a bit pointless. I'd typically enjoy these scenes (Hell, I praised the hell out of Katawa Shoujo whenever it did that sort of thing), but since Railgun had proven to me it could do better with the same kind of material, it felt a bit disappointing. The four or five episodes after the end of the first arc of the first season are by far the weakest part of the show. The second flaw stems from being based on Index: The first arc of the second season ends kind of abruptly, because it was originally an Index storyline. As such, a lot of great build up is wasted on a payoff that's ultimately centred around Touma and not the characters that we've been watching the whole thing happen through. Fortunately, this is actually really cleverly used to push Misaka's development further along in the second arc of the season, which ultimately results in an absolutely stellar climax.

Character and World Building: 10/10
Jesus Christ, it's good at this. The entire cast is endearing as hell, and goes through large amounts of juicy character development. We get to spend both fun and hard times around them, which helps us love them even more. Not only this, but we get to see Academy City developed to its fullest, in both its light and dark sides, and it's glorious. Aside from a few very mildly annoying character traits, and one or two bland people, there's very little to dislike here.

Story: 8.5/10
Every single arc is brilliantly built, with a smooth progression from beginning to middle to end. We start small, and get big, and it all feels perfectly natural and logical. There's a few unfortunate flaws here and there, but these are largely hidden from view by how great the rest of the story elements are. The show does climaxes particularly well, with the end of every arc being an extremely cathartic experience.

Presentation: 4.5/5
It looks a lot like Index, for obvious reasons. However, fight scenes look a lot more visually impressive, and have a lot more creativity on display. The soundtrack, which I really enjoyed in Index, also feels quite a bit better this time around. We also get to see Academy City at day a lot more, which I feel just makes the show more pleasing to look at.

Enjoyment: 15/15
Railgun is an absolute blast to watch. There's ups and downs, there's highs and lows, and you feel for the characters the whole way through. You spend your time being silly with them, but when the situation gets serious you're still with them 100% of the way. The end-of-arc climaxes feel great, and the more sombre moments pack quite a bit of a punch. There's simply not a lot to complain about.

Overall: 10+8.5+4.5+15/40
                38/40
               (Simplifies to 9.5/10)

I guess I scored Railgun higher than I did Mirai Nikki, which I considered my favourite anime up until now. I'm not sure whether that's changed - scoring is a tricky beast that doesn't 100% reflect opinion - but the fact that I'm seriously considering that possibility should tell you all you need to know. Railgun is absolutely phenomenal, blowing its more than competent parent show completely out of the water. To put it plain and simple, there's very little that Railgun gets wrong: It nails characters, it does a fantastic job on its story, and it's set in an amazingly realized world. Railgun has the highest rating that I've given out on this blog so far, and it deserves every little bit of it.

Toaru Majutsu no Index - How Misfortunate!

Toaru Majutsu no Index is a weird one. It's one of those shows that I like, but, when asked to point out why I like it, I will pretty much blank. As per recently usual, I'll be reviewing both Toaru Majutsu no Index I and II as one show. This does not, however, include the Toaru Kagaru no Railgun spinoff series, nor the shittone of light novels or manga.

Toaru Majutsu no Index (English title A Certain Magical Index, and referred henceforth to as simply Index) follows Touma, a student in Academy City, built specifically as a center of academia and science. Touma is what is known as an Esper, someone who, through the power of techno-babble, is able to perform seemingly magical feats. His only power lies in his right hand, soon nick-named Imagine Breaker, which can cancel out other Esper's abilities by touching them (which we soon discover also affects magic). Despite how useful this proves during Touma's adventures, this isn't considered a proper, scientific Esper phenomenon, as it cannot be properly explained, and Touma is considered a Level 0 Esper: Practically no Esper ability.

Soon into the series, Touma finds a girl in what appears to be a religious habit on his balcony: This turns out to be the titular Index (Written with non-italic letters, so as to not be confused with the title of the show, Index. Got it? OK.). Index appears to be, indeed, a human index of 103,000 grimoires, which she has perfectly committed to memory. Soon thereafter, Touma finds himself enveloped in the world of magic, where various groups of magicians plan to overthrow the scientific world lead by Academy City, or just squabble amongst one another.

I could recount events after this point, but it's frankly sort of pointless. Index isn't really a show with a plot, or rather, not a show with an overaching plot. Every three or four episodes involve Touma and his ever expanding entourage of side characters getting involved in a different, mostly self-contained adventure. Despite their short length, they do a surprisingly good job of seeming impactful and important, though this actually grated me at points: The odds are constantly brought very high, which just ends up being exhausting. It seems not an arc goes by where thousands of lives aren't threatened. It'd be perfectly fine if there were a couple arcs where the only real thing at risk is the life of one of the characters we care about. This is made worse by the fact that the precious few arcs where this is the case are by far the strongest.

Still, the stories that the arcs tell are typically entertaining. Each one focuses on Touma and Index, along with a few members of the side cast, and usually introduces a couple new side-characters and a villain, helping keep things fresh. They do eventually fall into a bit of a predictable pattern, but there's just enough variation around to prevent them becoming stale: One story will find Touma joining forces with the magician Style to slowly climb up an alchemist's lair, whilst another will have Touma and a couple other characters tracking a courier with a dangerous artifact all around Academy City.

Since the series de-emphasizes story, it has a necessity to be carried by its characters, and here's where the show feels very strange. I've been meaning for a while to write a piece about character development vs character depth, and here's where I wish I had, because it would make explaining the following a hell of a lot easier. You see, Index is a show whose characters are, with two exceptions, really static - they barely get any development, but they have a satisfying amount of depth to them. That is to say, they don't change throughout the series, but we get a fairly decent idea of who they are.

This would typically result in me finding a show dull  - there's no real story to follow the whole way through, and the characters don't provide meaningful engagement by the means of developing. It's partially for shows like these that I felt the enjoyment rating should be more important: There's nothing wrong on a technical level, but by all means I should've found this thing immensely dull.

And yet I don't. Index was more than fairly entertaining, it was genuinely addicting. Perhaps the reason for this is that there's just so damn many characters, and all of them feel varied and unique in their own ways. Early in season 2 the archetypal good, clean and polite religious person character was introduced. I scoffed at the idea, being sure that we'd already seen this character before, before realizing that in a showed centered greatly around religious bickering, we'd never had this particular flavor of character before, a whole season in. The fact that, despite being blatant stereotypes, characters more often than not manage to be genuinely endearing also really helps, despite being just as surprising to me.

It's hard to pick out a main cast among such a huge group of characters, seeing as how none of them really get that much screentime apart from the main duo, but I'd like to point out a few that I feel deserve this title.

First off, we have Touma. He is pretty much as anime protagonist as anime protagonists get. However, he still manages to be bizarrely likable: his constant comedic misfortune (to the point where his catchphrase is the rather clumsily translated "How Misfortunate!") manages to be funny, despite it being a gag that's been done a million times, perhaps due to his comic self-awareness about the whole thing. One thing that I appreciated is that Touma is never given a reason to be as heroic as he becomes in moments of danger, he just is, and no one really questions it because that's just what Touma does. He does have a bad habit of repeating variations of the same speech to every villain he meets, but these are usually brief enough that they're not all that annoying.

Then there's the titular Index. She's perhaps the weakest character of the four I'd consider "the main cast", being little more than the traditional energetic young girl with a mysterious power. She fits the role OK, has a running comedic gag that is very hit-and-miss, and the occasional good emotional moment. After the arc centered around her in Season 1, she honestly doesn't seem to have much to do, and is definitely not enough of a powerful force in the plot to justify having the series named after her, though she's unquestionably around the most after Touma. Before writing this review, the word that kept popping to mind to describe Index's quality as a character was "inoffensive".

Then we have Misaka, also known as Railgun, a powerful Level 5 Esper (One of only seven in Academy City, as we are incessantly reminded) around whom the spinoff Toaru Kagaru no Railgun (A Certain Scientific Railgun, for those who, like me, don't know Japanese) revolves. She's your run-of-the-mill snarky and grumpy girl character. Despite this, I actually found myself really liking her, to the point where she's quite possibly my favorite character in the show. Something about the way she behaves just seems a lot more human than her archetype usually is, perhaps because she's also shown to be genuinely shy and silly at points. Later in the show she develops a crush on Touma, and the way she tip-toes around this and begins acting feels very natural, especially considering she is in middle school.

Finally, we have Accelerator, who is initially introduced as an antagonist, but grows into more of an anti-hero role. I found him immensely annoying during his stint as an antagonist, but once he becomes a more well-rounded character he becomes a fairly good addition to the roster. He's perhaps the character who develops the most, though it's through a rather cliche arc. It's still not boring to experience, but I can't say I ever felt any joy when the focus of the show shifted away from Touma and Index to Accelerator for episodes at a time.

However, the shows greatest strength doesn't lie in any of these factors: It's really the world and the ensuing battles that are interesting. The idea of the magical world and the technological world fighting isn't precisely novel, but is one that I feel is very much underused. As such, I greatly appreciated seeing it put in action fairly effectively here. There's also a decent deal of political intrigue going on behind the scenes: The different churches are constantly fighting against each other or against Academy City, which, though explained minimally, lends a decent deal of weight to the stuff going on in the foreground. The show also does a particularly good job of making up magical artifacts with sometimes genuinely terrifying powers, which often serve as McGuffins for an arc or two.

Of course, the whole Magic vs Technology aesthetic most importantly affects the fights. It's here where the show shines, with a host of interestingly powered enemies coming up against Touma, at least early on. By Season 2, the creativity wanes a little bit, and most attacks only really differ in what color the projectiles being thrown at Touma are. Fortunately, Season 2 manages to differentiate its bad guys by how they conjure said projectiles rather than what the projectiles do: One character casts spells using small strips of paper, for instance, whilst another uses a staff as a multi-purpose voodoo doll.

Whilst Touma's power (being exclusively a defensive one) seems like it'd be a clever way for the writers to force themselves to write him out of corners in more interesting ways, it ultimately only serves to make all the fights he's in very samey. Aside from enemies who fight in extremely creative ways, Touma's power means that he'll ultimately win most fights by blocking attacks with his right hand, and then uppercutting the enemy. This is really cool for the first few times, having a really kinetic and visceral feel to it that magic simply lacks, but eventually gets tired and predictable.

The other big issue with combat is the how extremely underused the science side is. We only get to see a few Espers fight, and most of them honestly feel like they're using magic in all but in name. Railgun, especially, whose power is channeling electricity feels like she fits in perfectly with the magician Style, who harnesses the power of fire. There just isn't enough of a technological feel to them: aside from a few instances, it doesn't feel like they're limited or empowered in any way by the fact that this isn't magic. What's most frustrating is that, when it goes right, there's a few really cool ideas there. I really like Accelerator's power, that being the ability to change any vector quantity that comes in contact with him. It's a nice, science-feeling power, and the show just doesn't do that kind of thing enough.

Character and World Building: 8.5/10
A large cast of unchanging but endearing characters inhabit a world that's got some really cool flavor to it, and enables them to do battle in really cool ways. A few of the things that the various Churches get up to are really insane in a very good way.

Story: 6/10
It's usually inoffensive, but has a decent amount of moments where it shines quite brightly. The events that go on in Index won't leave anyone stunned, but you'd be hard-pressed to be too bored, either.

Presentation: 4/5
Some really cool powers elevate this show beyond the rest. The art style is very much just there, but perhaps the unsung hero is the soundtrack, which has a really interesting, almost dissonant feel. It goes very well with the action, providing appropriate backing for everything from tension to comedy.

Enjoyment: 12/15
I really don't know why I liked Index as much as I did. It's not a bad show by any means, but it doesn't scratch any of my personal itches. Still, I found myself often grinning at the antics the characters got up to, and, despite never really feeling too deeply invested, I got a great amount of enjoyment from the fighting and drama.

Overall: (8.5+6+4+12/40)
                30.5/40
                Roughly 7.5/10

Despite the fact that I've left the show feeling pretty happy with having watched it, I can't help but shake the feeling that I shouldn't have. Index is a show that does a lot of things I don't like, and very few things I do like, yet I still came out with a good impression. Still, I review the experience I had, and not the experience I feel like I should've had by my idea of what my standards are, and I had a pretty good one with Index.

Look forward to my review of the spinoff based around Railgun, coming soon.