Dandara - 25/52

     If there’s one thing you can gather from this blog, it’s that I hold a deep amount of love for the subgenre of action-adventure games known as ‘Metroidvania’, taking its name from the classic Metroid and Castlevania games.  Fortunately for me, there is no shortage of these kinds of games.  The indie scene loves the way Metroidvanias flow, starting out simple and just unlocking more environments and getting bigger and more complex as it goes along.  It allows them to create these vast, expansive worlds that seem so beautiful and so atmospheric from just the most simple of elements.  The downside is that with all the Metroidvanias out there, a lot of them get lost in the shuffle.  So it makes me happy whenever I find something of a hidden gem in the genre, and even more happy when I get to share it with people.  And what do you know, I just so happen to have a hidden gem Metroidvania AND a platform to discuss it.  It’s almost as if this is the exact reason I started the 52.  This is Dandara, and this is going to be a ride, let me tell you.

     Dandara puts you into the role of the eponymous Dandara, a young woman who has recently awoken from an eternal sleep to find that she has been chosen by creation itself.  Her mission: to protect her land, a haven for the arts that’s being slowly corrupted by a powerful supernatural army fueled by greed, seeking to kill or enslave the warriors and artists living there.  Dandara must go across the land, freeing the various gods and supernatural beings that have been enslaved by this greed and destroying those who ally themselves with it.  Along the way she’ll do the usual Metroidvania things like near freely moving around the map, getting powerups, backtracking with those powerups to get even more powerups, using those powered-up powerups to power through the bosses and then eventually getting strong enough and going through the map enough to reach the big bad slavemaster himself, a golden man named Eldar, and fighting him for the fate of the world.  And then probably failing a few times and it being no big thing because you recently hit a save point.  It’s all the classic Metroidvania fun we all know and love.

     It’s hard to describe why Dandara’s story works.  It’s admittedly a very bare bones story, the kind of thing you’d expect from a game centered more about the freedom of exploration than any sort of concrete linear narrative.  But seeing it in action, it’s incredibly engrossing and endearing.  It’s the kind of thing that works more in a visual medium, seeing this world unveil and letting yourself become a part of it.  I felt while I was playing Dandara that I was seeing a new mythology being born, which is a feeling I’m never against as I’m a massive mythology buff.  Like Dandara is secretly this ancient creation story lost to time that only the developer’s ancestors knew about and they decided to share this piece of their own history and folklore with the rest of the world.  A tale of art dominating greed and the warrior who made it all happen.  Which, a similar thing to that did happen, but we’ll get around to that later on.

     The gameplay of Dandara is where I can definitely see it getting divisive.  Dandara doesn’t move like a normal video game protagonist does.  Like, especially in the Metroidvania genre, you’d expect the protagonist to behave similar to Samus or Alucard, with a basic moveset primarily consisting of running, jumping and some manner of offensive attack.  Dandara instead determines that why run when you can instead jump between the ceilings, walls, and floor.  After all, Dandara is not a slave to anyone or anything, and that includes gravity.  However, this does limit Dandara’s movement options considerably, as her only way to progress is to jump between white surfaces in a diagonal fashion.  I can totally see where this limit of movement could turn some people off. it is very restrictive and there is a bit of a learning curve to Dandara’s range and what angles she can go at.  But I feel like it’s worth sticking too, as once you get it down, Dandara becomes a supremely satisfying and very fast flowing game.  The flow of Dandara when you get going is one of the best I’ve ever had just from how quick and nimble you are.  I could definitely see this game becoming a great speed game as a result of Dandara’s lightning fast movement, and the speedruns for it being insanely entertaining to watch.

     Dandara’s combat capabilities are not nearly as limited, but there’s still a lot restriction there.  Before getting any of her extra weapons, Dandara only has a surprisingly short ranged triple shot.  Its range being limited isn’t too much of a problem for most of the game as usually, you’ll be in short hallways where you can just hang above enemies to shoot them.  And, to its credit, it does do a surprising amount of damage, killing most regular enemies in one or two shots if you line it up well.  But therein comes the other issue, aiming your shots.  It’s not too difficult to line up your shot, but it can get very confusing to switch from platforming to shooting as the angles are the exact opposites.  It was very disorienting for myself at the very beginning and even late game there were certain moments where quickly switching between the two has left me confused on which angles I was originally going for.

Notably, these missiles were not way back in the woods.  Still evergreen, though.

     And then there are the extra weapons.  Dandara does something kind of cool by having most of your extra weapons just be hidden bonuses to reward you for your exploration, with only the missile being a required part of the game.  I’m all for Metroidvanias giving you notable rewards for your in-depth analysis of the world rather than just giving you minor upgrades to things you already have.  But I also understand, for balance sake, why you’d want to nerf these other extra weapons, as you don’t want to feel like you’re punishing the player for only wanting to get through your game.  I don’t particularly care for how useless all the extra weapons, besides the missiles, are.  At best, the other extra weapons are situational and, indeed, I did find some minor use in certain situations, like having to hit hard to reach enemies hidden in corners I can’t flip too or doing a lot of damage with the laser shot that you can stick to a wall.  But mostly they’re just useless.  It feels like there could’ve been more of a buff to these hidden powers without them feeling broken in my personal opinion.  On the plus side, though, the missiles are great and will be basically your main extra weapon throughout the game.

     So, let’s talk about salt.  Dandara surprisingly doesn’t hide its health and weapon upgrades amongst the treasures of the world, as is fairly typical in Metroidvanias.  I mean, there are certainly health and weapon power-related upgrades to be found, but they take the form of potions rather than your e-tanks or the like.  Rather, Dandara opts to have something a level up system, where our lovely lady Dandara collects EXP from defeating enemies, overcoming obstacles, finding certain secrets and fusing with the souls of the departed warriors that all died of various causes, absolutely none of which actually relate to the invasion or enslavement of the world.  This experience is known as ‘salt’.  I wrote this entire paragraph as a long set-up to a disappointing reveal about something that amuses only me.  Foreshadowing to my KH3 post.  Anyways once you have collected this salt, you can go back to any of the campsites throughout the game, which acts as a combination save point, level point and archive of your current ability-set, to upgrade either your health, weapon power or the effectiveness of the potions on both of these mechanics.  Which are humorously called ‘Essence of Salt’ and ‘Infusion of Salt’.  Which are both excellent descriptors of what playing Mario Party with Peach as an AI player is like.  Unfortunately, any time Dandara dies, she loses any and all built up experience.  You can go back to your death point to restore your salt, but if you die in between, you lose that past self, so be careful there.  It’s like the Mummy Demastered all over again.

     Speaking of being careful, as one might expect Dandara isn’t exactly an easy game.  There’s a lot of annoying enemy placements and ridiculous attacks and just general HP sponges throughout the game that you’ll encounter, probably die to and then have to struggle to get back to where you were previously to gain any lost EXP.  It’s not too bad in terms of difficulty for the majority of the game, a lot of my deaths for the first 75% of it were just me being generally bad at games.  Then you get to the last part, the Dream Lands and the Fortress and hoo boy does this game take a turn.  The Dream Lands is the penultimate section of the game and starting out, they actually aren’t too terrible.  You’re basically just playing more challenging versions of previous maps that serve as a nice test of what you’ve learned in the game.  Then the enemies that kind of resemble Metroids get involved and it just starts becoming a nightmare.  These enemies take five hits minimum no matter what you’re using and in a certain part of the Dream Lands, every enemy you kill turns in to one of these after death so you have to kill them twice.  I eventually just gave up and tried powering through the area best I could until I got through to the area boss.  And the fortress is just the worst, just room after room of the evilest enemies the game has concocted which sounds reasonable on paper, but in practice it is fighting a ton of enemies you’ve never seen before and hoping you make enough progress to where you don’t have to replay a part again, but also not because you might die and simultaneously lose and gain 10,000 salt.

     Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite segment, Ethan gushes about pixel art.  Dandara is astonishingly beautiful, perhaps one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen.  The environments are so lively and ominous and magical and it just adds to the general mythological feel of this whole thing.  The sprite work is, for the most part, incredibly gorgeous and insanely detailed.  There’s just so much heart and soul put into every single character, every animation, every environment, it’s just such a shame that Dandara very distractingly doesn’t have a face.  I’m not trying to discredit the rest of the visuals, mind.  The game is legit gorgeous, as I’m sure you’ve seen throughout this post.  But the fact that every single character is so beautiful and detailed and yet the main character spends the entire game missing her face, it’s just the tiniest bit jarring.  But it is just a tiny thing and the game looks great otherwise so, whatever.

I don't have any pictures of Dandara the person so enjoy more of this game's beauty.

     So, let’s detour real quick into the 17th Century, because like it or not you’re going to learn something from all of this.  Don’t worry, it’s super important and relevant to this game.  We’re heading off to Brazil, specifically the colonial period.  Brazil at one point, as many countries were, was heavily involved in the trade of African peoples to be used as slave labor.  We don’t know any specific dates as to where our tale begins, but it’s some point in the early 17th century.  A massive slave revolt broke out, dozens if not hundreds of Africans and Afro-Brazilians fleeing from their bondage and formed a civilization in the dense vegetation of Serra da Barriga in the state of Alagoas, a kingdom that would come to be known as Quilombo dos Palmares, or just Palmares for short.  In this kingdom, Quilombos, escaped slaves, could live free as farmers and warriors and kings.  One of those kings, the second and unfortunately final king was Zumbi, renamed Zumbi dos Palmares as king.  But we’re not here to talk about Zumbi, rather, let's talk about Zumbi’s wife, a hunter, an agriculturalist, and a master of the techniques of the Afro-Brazilian martial art known as capoeira, a martial art that combines elements of dance, music, and acrobatics to form a quick, powerful and complex style of fighting.  Let's talk about Dandara.

     We don’t know when or where Dandara is born.  She may have been born into slavery, she may have been sold into it.  But the important part is that Dandara was considering someone else’s property at a very young age.  Not content to spend the rest of her life being considered no essentially no better than livestock, she joined a group of Afro-Brazilians building a resistance to slavery.  It is here we can assume that she met Zumbi, fell in love, got married and inevitably had three children.  Dandara was a warrior first and foremost, as you can imagine considering her previously mentioned mastery of capoeira.  She devoted her life to protecting the kingdom she would eventually become queen of, as well as helping it grow by partaking in hunting and agriculture.  Palmares was far from a peaceful place though and it can be assumed that she spent more of her time at war than not.  

     The Dutch had started invading Palmares in 1630 and basically never stopped until the first king of Palmares, Ganga-Zumba, signed a peace treaty in 1678 that Dandara very vocally opposed.  This peace treaty would’ve sanctioned Palmares as a sort of micro-nation, allowing them to engage in trade and commerce, as well as free all Palmarino prisoners captured by the state of Pernambuco, in exchange for essentially sitting on their thumbs about any other slaves present in Brazil.  Dandara was not standing for that last part.  She wanted slavery dead, end of discussion.  After the assassination of Ganga-Zumba by an unknown Palmarino, Zumbi rose to Zumbi dos Palmares and Palmares returned to its state of constant fighting.  Dandara committed in 1694, a year before the death of her husband and the fall of her kingdom, after being arrested, choosing to die rather than return to a life of slavery.  Unfortunately, that’s all I know for certain.  The facts about Dandara are largely lost to time, with most everything we do have almost being folklore.  A 17th Century hero nearly lost to time.  But thanks to Long Hat House, we haven’t lost her completely.

     The parallels between the story of the real Dandara and her fictional counterpart are very obvious.  The main point of Dandara is the opposition of slavery, and Eldar even offers her an approximation of the deal that Ganga-Zumba had with the state of Pernambuco, stating that if she walks away and turns a blind eye, he will not harm her.  And much like her real-life counterpart, she would rather die than let her people suffer in exchange for personal safety.  But even the world of Dandara is representative of the real world.  Dandara is from a massive kingdom devoted to the arts and agriculture.  She even utilizes said arts in both her combat and her platforming.  Outside of her village is just a massive forest that’s full of crazy and violent creatures and hiding so many secrets.  Beyond the forest is a massive desert to the north, not any connecting back to the real world but more a metaphor for the loss of her original culture.  The desert is a massive abandoned and half destroyed archive, after all.  And then there’s the supposedly civilized world of the Eldarian forces and their fortress, a world built on greed and oppression that attempts to keep you content with its glitz and glamor so that you aren’t concerned with how its all made.  It's all fascinating and engrossing and I am eternally happy I got to see it unfold.

     Dandara is a criminally underrated game.  I can see all of its faults and I acknowledge that it is kind of weird to control and it is mayhaps too difficult at some points.  But I feel like it almost needs to be seen.  I don’t just believe it to be an exceptionally good game, I feel like both the story of the real Dandara and the mythology of the fictional one should be seen and should be told.  If it’s not for you I can’t begrudge you on that but for me, it was an experience I wasn’t expecting and I’m eternally glad I got to see.  I want to thank you all for reading and we’ll be back next time with a tale of swords and stones.  See ya guys then.

Azure Striker Gunvolt - 24/52

     There’s a certain level of hesitant excitement I think we all have when a series we hold near and dear to our hearts is being resurrected after seemingly being dead for many years.  You are of course excited to see one of your favorite video game franchises thrust back into the spotlight after this period of dormancy, but you’re also afraid that they might not be able to recapture the magic that was present in the series in the first place.  Even more tricky are the technical series revivals, when a developer or a team of developers from a favorite game or game series decides to make something akin to what they previously made but also something technically brand new.  And then they put it on Kickstarter.  Usually, these games end up being poorly received or underwhelming or unfairly judged because of people’s too high expectations for a game to recapture the very essence of their youth and if it doesn’t you treat it as if it is the worst thing ever.   Yooka-Laylee doesn’t deserve all its hate is all I’m saying.  But, in that rare instance that it does work out, usually when it’s independent of Kickstarter and stays mostly away from Keiji Inafune, you get something familiar, fun and worth every second of the time you spent on it.  Which brings us to today’s subject, Azure Striker Gunvolt.

     Azure Striker Gunvolt puts you into the role of the titular Gunvolt, which is definitely not a ridiculously over-explanatory name.  Gunvolt, or GV as the game usually calls him, is a superpowered being (known in this game’s universe as an ‘Adept’) working for a secret shadow organization, Quill, to take down a different secret shadow organization, Sumeragi, who intends on taking over the world through the unstoppable power of J-Pop.  GV is sent in to destroy Sumeragi’s little anime idol, a butterfly girl Adept named Lumen, but has a change of heart after discovering that Lumen is actually nothing more than a projected personality of a young Adept named Joule, who has been kidnapped and forced to be Sumeragi’s slave due to her ability to control and empower other Adepts.  GV, finding out all this, realizes that he can’t kill someone who is essentially an innocent pawn in someone else’s game, and decides to defect from his shadowy organization and become a freelance bounty hunter of sorts, doing odd jobs, taking hits and frequently working for the shadowy organization that he had previously left to kill other Adepts that Sumeragi has under their employ, who are arguably just as much pawns in Sumeragi’s game and some of which are very likely innocent and just require serious mental help, but they’re not class-A waifu material so GV has no problem killing them in cold blood for a paycheck.


     The story of Azure Striker Gunvolt is fine.  It’s the kind of narrative you were likely to find in the Super Nintendo era from basically anything that wasn’t an RPG.  It’s more there to connect the stages and the gameplay together, which are where the game truly shines.  Though that’s not to say the story doesn’t hit its stride and become important either.  For about the first half of the game, it’s just ‘GV tries to protect his girlfriend from the organization that he mostly takes orders from still while fighting cool, elemental-themed boss’.  But after the halfway point, Gunvolt goes in this fascinating conflict about the responsibility of power.  It’s not deep stuff by any means, but it’s still interesting to see a serious topic like this in a game that normally has a predisposition to a heavily comedic, self-aware tone.  It’s compelling stuff.

     Speaking of that comedic tone, this game really goes all in on being light and self-aware.  One of the characters in particular, GV’s close friend and former coworker Zeno, is constantly spouting out one-liners and jokes about anime and video games and seems to be the most aware that they’re in a video game.  It’s an acquired taste, honestly.  If you like, say, Deadpool but only when he’s super jokey and self-aware, you’re probably going to enjoy this.  Myself, I felt it could get pretty obnoxious but it was overall harmless.  If it does bother you, you can turn off the dialogue during stages at any point, which is a nice bonus, as even without the jokes the various characters basically never shut up and a lot of your HUD during gameplay is taken up by dialogue.  Though you’ll end up missing some helpful tips so be wary of that.

     Azure Striker Gunvolt is an absolutely gorgeous game.  I’ve mentioned before my love of great pixel art and Gunvolt definitely did it for me.  All the sprites are incredibly detailed and beautifully animated, creating a feel and personality for the game that, even with the similarities to the Mega Man franchise, makes it feel like something all its own.  There’s a lot of gorgeous backgrounds on top of that, which really invoke the cyberpunk feel I think they were going for, considering how much of this game resembles Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and, of course, Mega Man X.  It’s the kind of retro styling I love, combining what I love about those games and reverse engineering it in modern tech to give it more life and more detail.  It’s honestly one of the best looking retro throwback games in my opinion and I could see myself just going back and hanging out in a section just to look at the beauty.

     The stage design in Azure Striker Gunvolt is very basic.  It feels a lot like someone testing out a formula more to prove a concept so they can expand upon it in the future.  I get a lot of Mega Man 1 vibes from it, with things like ‘fire level is full of lava and explosions’ or ‘plant level has a lot of wall and ceiling turrets’.  That isn’t to say there aren’t any cool gimmicks within the levels.  The underwater base level being at first a space level dealing with wormholes was pretty cool.  I loved the light level’s use of bounce pads and chaining bounces together through spikes and enemies.  And there’s a genuinely tense survival horror level at one point that I really dug.  Not to say that these levels don’t need their tweaks, as there’s a lot of the old Mega Man tropes like poor enemy placement or unfair, trap-heavy design.  But as a first game proof of concept, it’s a lot of fun.

     Soundtracks are also very important to this kind of game.  The Mega Man series is arguably more fondly remembered in the modern day for its music than it is for its actual games, and it’s honestly not a wrong assessment or view of the Mega Man series.  So it’s so very unfortunate that Gunvolt has a very underwhelming and forgettable soundtrack.  That’s not to say it’s bad of course, it does its job well, giving you something nice to listen to while you’re plowing through the robotic hordes of Sumeragi.  But I don’t find any of these tunes to be especially memorable.  I wasn’t humming the Biochemical Plant tune the same way that I did Flash Man’s theme when I first played Mega Man 2.  This, of course, might just be me not listening close enough or getting distracted, which is entirely possible, I’m hyper.  But if I’m so uninterested in your soundtrack that I opt to just play my own music over it, it means the soundtrack most likely didn’t grab me.

     The bosses in this game are kind of mixed for me.  There’s a lot to like about them as characters.  Each one has a very outlandish and memorable personality, as well as unique elemental abilities.  Instead of going for the basic ‘fire, ice, water, earth, etc’ formula, Azure Striker Gunvolt goes with Space, Insect, Light, Death, Fire, and Magnet.  This creates a pretty interesting set of bosses with fascinating designs and cool abilities.  Couple that with the characters’ cartoony villain of the week personalities, each based relatively on one of the Seven Deadly Sins, a good formula for basically any villain team, and you got yourself a good batch of robot masters.  For the record, the Sin equivalence go: Merak, the wormhole-creating Adept representing Sloth, Jota, the light manipulating Adept representing Pride, Viper, the pyrokinetic Adept representing Wrath, Carerra, the magnetic Adept representing Greed, Elise, the mistress of life and death representing Envy, Stratos, the insect controlling Adept representing Gluttony, and Zonda, the batlike, flying Adept representing Lust.  Though, we don’t get a lot of time with Zonda because of this game’s equivalent to Proto Man or Zero, Copen.  Copen is just a cool villain in his own right, a young man who despises Adepts and has devoted his life to ridding the world of them.  He’s even managed to develop a weapon that suppresses an Adept’s abilities, causing him to be a serious threat overall.  On the character side, these bosses get a thumbs up from me.

     On a gameplay side, these bosses are so incredibly cheap.  So many of their attacks feel less like a Mega Man style game and more like this is like if Touhou made a platformer.  The patterns themselves are very simple and a little repetitive, with many of the bosses having too few of a variety of attacks, but that doesn’t especially matter given the fact that they have so many hard to dodge, near screen sized attacks.  Each boss has an ultimate attack as well, which just serves to make their already ridiculous attacks near impossible to dodge, and they can do this attack as many times as they please if their health drops to a third and you don’t kill them fast enough.  It’s almost as if the game wants you to tank the hit, but that’s counter-intuitive to one of the games other mechanics.  It leads to a lot of unnecessary death.

     But it’s not like the enemies are the only cheap ones.  GV plays as you’d expect him to considering his resemblance to the protagonist of Mega Man X.  He’s able to jump, shoot, dash, wall grab, wall kick, all that good stuff.  I’ve never personally played an X game, but seeing them played has led me to believe that Azure Striker Gunvolt doesn’t have the same strong gameplay flow that X has, but it still feels nice to play overall.  But GV also has a lot of balancing issues as well, primarily in his guns and his powers.  Unlike his spiritual predecessors, GV doesn’t gain weapons based on the boss abilities after defeating them.  Rather, after he reaches certain requirements, he unlocks new weapons.  There’s the standard gun he starts out with, a charge shot, a catapult shot that you can launch from a floating target you fire to go an extra length and change direction, a two way spread shot, a shot that fires out a drone that proceeds to fire eight shots, and a shot that ricochets onto other enemies if it makes contact.  But you don’t need any of them.  The majority of these have severe situational use with no solid practical use, with the charge shot and the catapult shot almost being completely useless.  This is a problem just in the genre, honestly, but Gunvolt does it super poorly.

     But then there’s the opposite side of the spectrum.  Whereas most of the guns are severely underpowered and not very useful, GV’s powers are severely overpowered.  All GV needs is a mark, which can be done by successfully hitting an enemy with your gun’s shot, and GV can let loose with his electricity and decimate every normal enemy in his path.  It’s almost a joke how ineffective the stage enemies are, the only time they present any trouble is if they come upon you at random and are able to get some shots off on you in the chaos.  And this is only if you mark an enemy once, a single enemy can be marked up to three times and, depending on the gun, you can mark anywhere from two to eight times.  Mark one enemy.  Mark a bunch of enemies.  Destroy everything because your electrical field is severely unbalanced and could’ve used more handicaps.  The game is so aware of its unbalanced main mechanic that the first piece of equipment you’re alerted to in the game is a necklace that makes it so you don’t take damage from normal enemies if you have a charge, thus stopping you from just constantly using your electrical field and draining your charge.  But the game also gives you the ability to instantly restore your charge without apparent consequence, as well as gradually restoring your charge while you’re not using it, so still a ridiculously broken mechanic.

     Azure Striker Gunvolt’s most interesting mechanic is its Kudos system.  As you start to rack up kills without getting hit, GV starts accumulating points as well as a combo multiplier.  And then whenever you reach a checkpoint, you can kill the counter and add the numbers to your stage score for hopefully a higher ranking at the end of the stage.  It adds a really cool risk/reward mechanic to Gunvolt, do you play it safe hitting all the checkpoints along the way for small boosts to your overall score, or do you go for the risk of just skipping all of the checkpoints for the hopes of a grander multiplier, knowing that any bad jump or enemy horde might end your combo as well as potentially make you restart the whole stage.  It’s really cool.  Myself, I don’t care about the rankings so I didn’t try very hard at this, but I wouldn’t be against going back and replaying all the levels to attempt to try and S-Rank them.

      I’ve never played Mega Man X before, so I don’t think I got as much out of Azure Striker Gunvolt as others would.  But, I still had a lot of fun with the game.  It may not have been one of the most interesting experiences of my gaming career, I was really struggling to write about it because my general idea after was ‘it was good’, but it’s still a really good game nonetheless.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Azure Striker Gunvolt and we’ll be back next time with the fun, flipping adventures of Dandara.  See ya guys then.

Brütal Legend - 23/52

     There are very few companies in gaming that I personally love as much as Double Fine Productions.  Tim Schafer, the company’s founder, is quite possibly the most creative man working right now, coming up with great concepts on a consistent basis and being the head designer on many of my favorite games, including Grim Fandango, Broken Age, and the ever-popular Psychonauts.  He really has a talent for just coming up with the most amazing, bizarre ideas and finding a way to turn it into one of the most fun games ever produced.  So whenever I get the chance to play through another brilliant concept from the mind of Mr. Schafer, I jump at it.  You could imagine my excitement when the cookie drew one of the few games of his that I’ve never touched, Brutal Legend.  Even though I’m admittedly not a metalhead at all, I was excited to take that imagery and see it come to life in an amazing dystopian adventure hack and slash.  And Jack Black being in the lead wasn’t hurting things either, of course.  What I got was a little different than what I expected, but we’ll get to that later on.  In the meantime, this is Brutal Legend.

     Brutal Legend puts you into the shoes of Eddie Riggs (Jack Black), the best roadie in the world for the worst metal band in the world.  He goes on this whole thing about the importance of being a roadie, being the man who does all the hard work and gets none of the credit but loves it anyway because that’s what a roadie does.  According to him ‘a good roadie knows his whole job is to make someone else look good, keep someone else safe, help someone else do what they were put here to do’.  Additionally, ‘if he’s doing his job right, you don’t know he’s even there.  Once in a while, he might step on stage just to fix a problem, to set something right.  But then before you realize he was there or what he did, he’s gone.’  Pay attention to that, it’s kind of a thing with Eddie.  Anyways, while doing his job one day for the awful band that Eddie works for who definitely aren’t a pastiche of second-wave emo rock, he gets injured and bleeds out onto his belt buckle and accidentally unleashes an ancient chrome-skinned beast who proceeds to kill everything and ravage the landscape.  Eddie, fortunately, is mysteriously spared by the beast and proceeds to pass out, where he awakens in the distant past, where everything resembles a metal cover.  This School of Rock sequel ended up really weird.

     This isn’t the end to Eddie’s troubles of course.  The world he has awaken in has been taken over by the forces of hell, mankind lives almost exclusively in a slave position under the rule of General Lionwhyte, a representation of glam metal that we’re going to get back to later, and the resistance is basically just three people hanging out around a giant sword and trying to survive.  Eddie, of course, does get a magic axe (as in the weapon) out of it the deems him the chosen one who will either free or destroy the land.  Not that the land could get any more destroyed, but you know.  As well he gets a magic axe (as in the guitar) to shred on and do a variety of things from raising the ancient artifacts of this civilization to summoning the undead legions of metal fans to literally melting people’s faces off.  He decides to use these, as well as a roadster he makes out of some parts he finds lying around, to aid the resistance, who he discovers might be in need of a man with Eddie’s particular talents to serve as the resistance’s right-hand man.  It’s now up to Eddie to do all the groundwork for the resistance and march upon the various villain factions you’ll meet along the way.  None of whom are the devil voiced by Dave Grohl which is super disappointing.

     The story of this game admittedly isn’t very deep.  It’s your standard chosen one narrative but drenched in leather and denim and starring Jack Black.  But honestly, at least for the beginning of it all, that was enough to keep me going.  Maybe it was my trust in Double Fine or maybe it was my reading of other reviews saying that the story was one of the major strong points of this whole thing, but I was actually pretty open to all of this despite my distaste for metal.  Unfortunately, as I went further along in the game, that pretty quickly fell apart.  The entire first half of the story relies on you being a devout metalhead and without that it just falls flat.  The first half villain is basically just someone to rage against as a manifestation of the commercialism of metal and I just can’t muster the energy to care about that.  And without that, all he is is a not especially intimidating or interesting villain.  And this issue repeats with the rest of the narrative.  The really major villain, the demon emperor Doviculus, only appears three times and his only character trait is being Tim Curry as a demon.  The second half of the story is based around a conflict that is started by the main character just being stupid and unlikable.  And at its core, it is just a dystopian revolution story but this time it’s metal and this might just be me living in a post-dystopian YA novel boom world but I don’t find that especially interesting.  But, I could have also just been done with the story because, to spoil the verdict, I think this is an especially bad game.

     I’m going to fire off a few positives right now because I’m not going to have very many kind things to say about this so might as well get these out of the way first.  The voice acting in this game is fantastic.  The biggest and most important part of this is obviously Jack Black, who gives one of the best performances of his career in this thing.  Eddie is honestly not an especially deep character, most of his dialogue is catchphrases, snark and talking about how awesome it is to be a roadie, but Black brings this character to life and makes him very endearing.  Add to that the presence of industry staples such as Jennifer Hale, Kath Soucie and, of course, the always wonderful Tim Curry, playing the game’s love interest Ophelia, second in command and eventual leader of the resistance Lita and Doviculus respectively, to make the vocals all that more endearing.  And that’s not even mentioning the presence of metal legends like Rob Halford of Judas Priest, the late Lemmy the Lurch of Motorhead and, of course, Ozzy Osbourne.   The cast ties this game together and breathes more life into these characters than they really deserve.

     Speaking of those characters, I rag on them a little but they’re pretty solid too.  The main cast is composed of a lot of trope-y characters but they work very well for the kind of story this is, kind of a modern-day Norse myth sort of thing.  Lars Halford is a great leader archetype who unfortunately doesn’t last, Ophelia starts out being a fairly generic love interest but evolves into probably the game’s most complex character, Lita starts out a little rough around the edges but learns throughout the game to trust people regardless of their past and Magnus is just a fun sidekick character that ends up having the most fun lines.  As well the massive supporting cast of generic NPCs are all pretty one-note, but they’re fun to interact with.  The only characters who don’t really click in my opinion are General Lionwhyte and Doviculus, but that’s mostly because the latter isn’t in the game very often and is just a generic bad guy who spouts exposition mostly and Lionwhyte… we’ll get to him.

     The aesthetic for this game is really its strongest point.  The entire thing looks like a metal album come to life, with a lot of chrome and fire and destruction.  It’s a strange combination of beauty in grit and grime and ugly that surprisingly works.  It’s a world I wouldn’t mind going back and exploring if not for other factors.  As well, the game has a really nice artistic sensibility.  They don’t strive for realism really in this game and that’s to its benefit.  The game still looks gorgeous despite being several years old.  I especially love the character design on a lot of the generic NPC characters.  They start out fairly normal, just average concepts you would see in a metal concert taken to the nth degree, i.e. headbangers with massive muscular necks and giant flat faces or bouncers with massive fists and muscular arms.  But once the Sea of Black Tears starts being present as a faction, we get a lot of cool goth metal designs that I personally think are the strongest in the game.  Of course, the jungle-dwelling KISS Amazons are also rather nice.  This game is so cool visually.

     The soundtrack to Brutal Legend is just not my thing, but I have to imagine if you’re into the metal, you’ll really dig it.  There are 20 songs composed specifically for this game that all sound like awesome metal riffs with screaming vocals, as well as an additional 107 licensed metal songs that can be unlocked and listened to while driving the overworld.  The sheer amount and variety of metal in this game is astonishing, with legends like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Motorhead to bands like Anthrax, Mastodon and a band which is definitely not a joke to me, Megadeth.  There are even a couple actual comedy bands in here, with Tenacious D contributing a couple songs to the soundtrack because, you know, their lead singer is the star of the show, and Dethklok of all people making an appearance.  Even Through the Fire and the Flames is here, so you can relive your embarrassment from ten years ago and the time you attempted to play it on expert in Guitar Hero III to impress your friends only to fail out of the opening section.  It feels like they really did their homework to make the most awesome metal soundtrack possible for all the people who are into that sort of thing.  Me personally I just played with the game on mute most of the time while blasting some low down acoustic neo-folk music like the hipster I am. Though there is definitely an appeal to riding around the game's world blasting Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue.

     So, here’s where we get into the multitude of problems I have with this game.  Now, everything I’ve currently said about the game is all well and good, but what good is a game if you can’t play it.  You know, assuming it’s meant to be played in the first place, it’s not like this is a visual novel or anything.  This is unfortunately where Brutal Legend falls apart.  There are basically three faces of Brutal Legend, all ranging from ‘meh’ to ‘unplayable’.  There’s Brutal Legend as the hack-and-slash action brawler, Brutal Legend as the big one on one real-time strategy game and Brutal Legend as the big exploration and mission heavy sandbox game.  I’m going to tackle them one at a time in detail to hopefully explain why, in spite of all the praise I’ve had thus far, I think this game is just really truly awful.  You know originally I was planning on this being a fun, easy review with a lot of Tenacious D jokes and a general theme of ‘it’s not for me but I can still recommend it’.

     Brutal Legend as a hack-and-slash action game is easily it’s best face.  The gameplay is almost designed exclusively for this.  There are loads of combos to learn, several stages to just power through and beat up enemies and really, if this is what Brutal Legend was primarily based around, I probably would’ve gotten on with it a lot more.  That’s unfortunately not saying much.  While Brutal Legend is a good beat ‘em up in concept, execution ruins it hard.  The combat in this game is not especially satisfying or rewarding or, you know, fun.  Eddie’s axe, the Separator, doesn’t really feel like there’s any weight or substance to it, so every slash feels more or less the same and leaves the player cold.  Even with the option of gore added into it, which you can turn on or off at the beginning of the game, it doesn’t feel fun to slash your way through enemies.  Take this combat versus something like, say, Bayonetta.  Bayonetta’s attacks have that weight to them, that power.  You enjoy fighting because it feels intense and fun.  Brutal Legend is just completely missing this.  And let’s not even talk about Eddie’s useless ranged attacks with his guitar, Clementine.

     Brutal Legend’s overworld has a lot of space and not a lot to fill it.  Sure, there’s missions you can do and objects you can find, but the missions are all ‘take out this group of enemies’ or ‘compete in this race’ or the occasional ‘stop some of your army from charming the ladies other members of your army are trying to romance.’  It’s not engaging work and is more an unfortunate extension of the game’s failures as a beat ‘em up.  The objects you can find, meanwhile, are all visually impressive but only give you the most minor of rewards in the long run.  Everything in this game gives you this hybrid money-experience to be used to upgrade Eddie and his vehicle, the Deuce.  Which is great if you like how this game plays and can find the shop to do it, something that becomes increasingly and unnecessarily difficult to do as the game progresses.

     Also, there’s the Deuce itself which, look, I don’t like vehicles or vehicle sections in games that otherwise don’t have them and aren’t designed for them.  At best they’re distracting and at worst they’re less a stage and more the reason you’re about to make a hole in the nearest available wall.  And the Deuce is probably the worst vehicle in this kind of game I’ve ever seen.  It’s too fast, too loose and too often required to progress in the game for you to not pull your hair out at some point.  It has a brake, but as far as I can tell it’s not for drifting, it’s for stopping you immediately regardless of whether or not you’re holding the gas and then immediately kicking yourself into reverse.  At some point, I started calling the Deuce ‘the Pinball’, because that’s closer to how it felt.  Not really controlling it, just bouncing back and forth between obstacles until I could get a straightaway.  And of course, it’s basically required to navigate the overworld reliably because it’s way too huge to cover on foot without taking an eternity.  Pick your poison, either way it has its thorns and it’s everything but a good time. I'm terrible.

     But I saved the worst for last.  When I was first playing Brutal Legend I was so sure that Brutal Legend as the open world game was going to be the worst shade just for the Deuce alone.  But I just couldn’t, the true face of Brutal Legend just built up so much ill will from me I had to put it last.  Brutal Legend, despite being designed like an exceptionally mediocre hack-and-slash beat ‘em up, decides that it is, instead, a third person, over-the-shoulder, army vs. army real-time strategy game.  And it is horrid.  There are still positives to it, admittedly.  This is really where that Double Fine charm kicks in the most.  See, much like most RTS games and most strategy games in general, unless your name is Fire Emblem, Brutal Legend requires resources in order to construct the units at the base, as well as a way to harness those resources.  But Brutal Legend decides to play it as a giant battle of the bands, with your resources being fans, your ability to harness those resources being giant, towering merchandise booths and the base being a massive stage.  And fans allow you to summon various units, the aforementioned metal stereotypes taken to the nth degree, such as your standard melee units being headbangers, your standard ranged units being groupies and so on.  It’s a clever use of the concept that justifies its theme and setting.

     Then you can see why it’s such a downright shame, such an awful waste, that these sections are actively trying not to be fun.  First off, the game doesn’t ever give you a proper tutorial or understanding on how these sections work.  This is something Tim Schafer has even lamented after the game’s release, especially since this gameplay is at the core of the multiplayer and the game doesn’t give you anything to go off other than ‘build merch booths, build units, charge, die, figure out what you did wrong, charge again’.  Defense is a dirty word to this game too, at least in the single player.  There’s no point in playing even the least bit defensively because the crux of the RTS segments is so built around offense that it’s better to just charge on the enemy base than it is to protect your own.  And then the one time after you’ve established the flow of these segments where you have to play defensively, you’re basically just still playing offensively and there are no negative repercussions other than you losing units.  

     Which is problem number two.  Resource management is an important part of strategy games and Brutal Legend is no different.  The problem arises when there’s only one resource that you’re amassing fairly slowly and the game often needs you to drastically change your entire army layout between points in the fight.  Take, for instance, the Lionwhyte boss fight at the halfway point of the game.  The majority of this level is played very standardly, with you making units to march upon all the fan geysers, killing the monsters covering them and then taking them for yourself.  But then, once you’ve accomplished that, you need to suddenly build an entire force of more expensive units to take down Lionwhyte’s two guard towers so you can march the full force of your army onto his base and destroy it.  And each of these units you need to make also requires you to upgrade your base twice.  So to just build one of these sets of units, you need a total of 900 fans as well as the time to upgrade your base twice and conquer the stage while also building other units so you can do so.  And it takes forever to get 900 fans even with that.  If I have the stage fully conquered and I’m doing a good job of upholding my dominance, I’ll get roughly 12 fans every half second.  I need 900.  So throw on an extra 37.5 seconds to my stage time just waiting to amass the necessary resources only for it to come down to whether or not RNGesus is kind that day and these units that I spent so long waiting to build can safely get across the battlefield to do the thing I need them to do. And there's also a 40 unit limit at any given time, which doesn't sound too bad until you realize your standard units actually count for four units rather than just the one.

    And then there's problem number three, the fact that, with all of this RTS nonsense going on, the game still expects you to be on the ground hacking and slashing your way through the hordes of enemies.  You have to play double duty as warrior and commander, because quite frankly your units are all idiots who will always opt to gang up on a single enemy rather than spread themselves out and take out the bunch at once, leading to a quick defeat and more unnecessary fan cost.  And, yes, the game does give you options to command your troops.  Unfortunately, your options don't amount to anything more complex than 'head in direction', 'head towards tower', 'head towards enemy' and 'stop'.  That’s it.  And it’s always the full brunt of your army, or whatever section of it is available in a specific radius, and it’s always one of these four options.  The game does give you the ability to give individual units or groups of units orders to act out.  Which is all fine and good, but often times the units are in some manner of chaotic mess and highlighting them for individual orders ends up as too much of a headache.  And you’re basically left completely open for attack by enemy units or the enemy commander while you're trying to highlight individual units.  Side tangent, I really hate that modern gaming, especially the western gaming market, have just decided having a HUD is bad.  I get nothing from the screen changing color as I get hit.  Screen turns to red, I could have ten hits left or I could have one.  Also, since this isn’t meaty enough to get a whole paragraph, the game never tells you the base is capable of defending itself in some way.  Or healing itself.  You have to either find that out by seeking it out in the in-game lore journal or by just happening upon it by chance.

     But you know what, fine.  The gameplay isn’t great, but hey, all games don’t need great gameplay if the other elements are strong enough to carry it.  I mean, I’m a Kingdom Hearts fan, I totally get loving a game despite it not being very fun to play.  So, let’s tackle Brutal Legend’s failures at being as cool as it wants to be.  And this starts, much like with most things that fail at being as cool as they want to be, with Through the Fire and the Flames.  General Lionwhyte’s defeat at the halfway point in the game marks a massive tonal and narrative shift, as you’d expect.  The game turns from being about fighting the commercialization of metal as represented by an absurd caricature of hair metal that doesn’t actually resemble any hair metaller to being an extremely lore heavy sword and sorcery story about fighting goth metal ghosts and BDSM demons.  And to represent this shift, the game decides to end Lionwhyte’s chapter with an escape sequence.  Set to Through the Fire and the Flames.  And, hoo boy did this game miss it’s chance to be awesome here.  First off, the Deuce doesn’t play any better here than it does anywhere else, leading to a lot of crashing, a lot of deaths and a lot of replaying the most obnoxiously self-important guitar bits in metal history.  Secondly, if you can get the Deuce to comply, the whole thing takes about two minutes to complete.  Meaning you’ll just be getting to the first chorus before the song awkwardly cuts out and you’ll never get to the impressive solo that comprises the back half of the song.  And this is where the game truly loses me, when it tries too hard and fails even harder at doing the one thing it is otherwise really good at, being cool. I would, for once, be perfectly fine with the game giving me a glorified cutscene just to use its intended setup to the best possible effect.

     But even that isn’t enough to make my have the burning distaste for this game that I do.  I have mentioned twice now that there’s a problem with Lionwhyte that I would get to later, and this is the time.  So, Lionwhyte is a representation of the commercialization of metal, and quite honestly, fair shake.  As someone who is generally open to my favorite genres finding success, I am still a little wary of the integration of popular culture into said genres because of how the tastes of someone uneducated in the genre can distort what I love about it.  I can only imagine with a subculture as huge as metalheads that this is a serious issue they deal with.  My problem comes with how they chose to portray this commercialization.  There are dozens of metal bands you can blame for this.  KISS, for instance, is almost entirely a commercial brand rather than being a band and has been for almost its entire lifespan.  Or you could go after Van Halen, who basically started hair metal and could be easily blamed for the commercialization of metal.  Or you could go after Bon Jovi, who lead second wave hair metal to popularity and it could be argued is responsible for the subsequent decline.  Or maybe even ACDC or Aerosmith, acts that blew up as metal/rock crossover and then opted to abandon the genre when the public consciousness changed. With all these options and many more that I can't mention for the sake of time or won't mention for the sake of not angering even more metal fans, it makes me wonder why they went with David Bowie.

     Now, I’m no David Bowie expert, my entire experience with him is Labyrinth, a movie I don’t particularly care for, Space Oddity, a song that I absolutely love, Under Pressure, where for years I thought that was just a straight Queen song and the musicless video for his and Mick Jagger’s cover of the classic Martha and the Vandellas R&B hit Dancing in the Street.  Even still, going to go out on a limb here and say he isn’t metal, has never been metal and, if he hadn’t tragically passed away, never would’ve been metal.  So why choose him.  Theory A is just that Rob Halford could do a really good Bowie and they had him so, you know, why not.  And, yeah, it’s a really good impression.  Theory B, however, which I find far more likely, is that they opted for an easy target that wouldn’t offend anyone’s metal sensibilities because metal fans are about their metal bands for life and you don’t want to start a war in your target demographic.  Which would be fair enough, except I don’t feel like they fully realized the consequences of this decision from their own thematic standpoint.

     See, by representing the commercialization of metal with someone who is very much not metal, it seems to me, as an outsider who doesn’t get this at all, that you’re taking a stance and saying that metal is better than everything else.  Which is totally your opinion and I get it, I could go on forever about how Paramore is the greatest band of all time.  But by making it such a definitive theme in your creation, it comes across rather as you not saying that it’s your opinion that metal is better based on personal taste, but rather that it’s a definitive truth.  Metal is just better, according to Brutal Legend.  It’s important and powerful and true art and its subgenres and competitors are all nothing more than abominations on the truth.  And this is the same arrogant, self-important attitude that made me almost walk out of La La Land when Ryan Gosling starts ranting about how jazz is objectively the greatest genre but only if it’s played the way he likes it.  It’s an attitude that stagnates art and creates militant fanbases and I just can’t jam with it.  You like metal, that’s cool, go crazy.  But it’s not better or worse than anything else.  Yes, even ska.  Though I might just be reading too much into it and this could just be a necessary device for the narrative and not a reflection of the thoughts and feelings of Tim Schafer or the other fine members of Double Fine that worked on this.  But I feel like it’s still important to bring up because I remember what it’s like being impressionable and going on with ideologies that are told to you in a factual manner just because they seem legit. Heck, that's the crux of the reason I never got into Star Wars, this being told that I should like something because it's this great, important thing and my opinions, which are otherwise a big 'eh', being shifted to be more negative as a result.

     I’m sorry that this one didn’t turn out as fun as my others.  Who would’ve thought that Brutal Legend was my breaking point.  I can’t recommend Brutal Legend.  I see a lot of good in this, and I want to recommend it just based on that.  But I’ve never wanted to stop playing something as much as I did with Brutal Legend.  I’m so disappointed too because it’s a huge passion project of one of my favorite devs and I just didn’t click with it at all.  But Brutal Legend is, in my opinion, just an especially terrible game and I’d rather not promote it regardless of the reason.  Play Psychonauts or Grim Fandango and you’ll likely see why I love Schafer so much.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Brutal Legend and next time around we’ll be going into the future with Azure Striker Gunvolt.  See ya guys then.