Pierre-Yves’ Games of the Year – 2018

 
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

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Game of the Year – Banner Saga 3

Stoic Games have just nailed it. Start to finish. You want to talk about choices? You want to talk about how one small decision can affect the outcome of an entire people? This. The Banner Saga 3 should be viewed as that benchmark. With the end of the trilogy now out, the full weight of your protagonists choices are laid bare for everyone to see. Did you follow the path of the father Rook how lost his daughter? Or did you take the path of his daughter that loses her father? Through either path there will be plenty of choices that to quote one of my favorite songs from Live, are the Beauty of Grey. There is no Black and White. There is no real at times Good or Bad. There just is and it was absolutely fantastic for it.

First Runner Up – Dragon Quest XI

I’ve been waiting on this one for a long time and for a little while we didn’t know if we were even going to get it because of the apparent “lack of interest” for the series. Finally in our hands the latest Dragon Quest is that. A Dragon Quest title in all of its Glory saddled up with loads of quality of life improvements for the series to make that classic gameplay relevant to today’s standards.

Second Runner Up – CrossCode

I’ve got to give it to the devs on this one. Wow. CrossCode blew away most of my expectations. Indie RPG. 16-bit classic look. Today’s gaming standards. It’s smooth, responsive, gorgeous to look at and fun for hours upon hours. Probably my fondest memory of this was going into the Early Access and reading the apology that only about fifty hours was currently available while they geared up for the full release. Fifty. Hours. Most AAA give you ten! Twenty if you add in a NG+. Thirty for a Platinum trophy on a PlayStation. CrossCode has also usurped .Hack as King for my single player MMO emulation.

Biggest Surprise – Towards the Pantheon

After having played the demo I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into this one. I mean the demo was fantastic but it was a horror based puzzle, again, in a 16-bit like classic look, but horrifying as hell for some moments. How did that translate into the final RPG? Beautifully. Acting as a backstory to the events of the whole and to one of your characters, all of Towards the Pantheon was wonderfully designed, written and musically orchestrated. Following an unlikely party, everything just worked and it was perhaps one of the best ten hours I’ve spent on a video game title this year.

Guilty Pleasure – Dauntless

While I haven’t been into “MonHon” as much as some of the others on the team, I’ve played the living hell out of multiple versions of Dauntless once it hit the Beta stages. Having started at the Alpha to get a taste for it, I didn’t want to put in too much effort and lose it all to a server wipe, so the day it launched? So did an unhealthy addiction both solo, with my brother and with other members of the team. Basically a “monster hunter lite”, not unlike Sacrifice: Sinner for Redemption being a “dark souls lite”, you get to get straight to the good part. The Fighting. Tons of customizations, a fair amount of weapon choices, and damn have I spent a lot of time hunting something just for pants. Literally because I needed to make pants as I had the rest of the set!

Biggest Disappointment – Noamund

Tales of like battle system? Chess like components? Interesting art style and RPG mechanics? Noamund had EVERYTHING it needed to make a splash. Having been Kickstarted and released on Steam, everything just felt lacking, unpolished and in certain cases sloppy as the default Spanish voices were left on but with no subtitles. Actually it even kept Spanish text in the Kickstarter backer location that was available to explore near the beginning. Add in sloppy gaming mechanics and what I was really looking forward to ended up being one of my biggest disappointments of the year.

 
Article by:  Pierre-Yves

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Noahmund - PC Review

Noahmund was a Kickstarted title that has recently been released upon the PC. Taking several ideas together such as turned based and real time strategy, Estudio Ábrego have created an almost slower Tales of series concept with an action combat system that relies on thinking ahead as to where you’re going to move as the biggest influence was Chess.

I want to note upfront that as much as I loved the concepts behind Noahmund, the technical issues and some of the design choices prevented me from really enjoying the adventure. Starting off with one of your protagonists passing her exam and becoming an agent, you are soon sent out on an adventure that leads to many perils some of them being as simple as unbalanced enemies causing you to see a game over screen until you figure out how to take them out instead of heading back to the last save point. But let’s start at the beginning shall we?

Noahmund’s world is created on what is essentially a game board comprising of squares to move on as you pass through. When out on the field this can work very well in your favour as you’ll never be blindsided by enemies and if you play your cards right you can even avoid them. Where things tank a little bit is that for every square that you want to move, you have to press “A” on your controller. EVERY. TIME. There’s no way to map movement onto either the D-Pad or the Thumbstick nor is there a way to simply hold down “A” to continue moving. You want to move, you have to hit “A”. This makes exploration feel really drawn out and honestly it wore down my finger quite a bit after a while.

Once you’ve moved into combat, there are three lines that you can move through in order to get up to or move away from your enemy. Attacks can be done front, back, up and down but special attacks, depending on which ones a character has, can only be done front or back so tactics needs to be adjusted accordingly. Like the map movement though, if you want to move a character in battle you have to keep moving the thumbstick in the direction that you want to move making it feel very mechanical instead of smooth like your enemies often appear to move. Like the map movement, if make things feel drawn out and I felt like more time was spent looking at where I was moving than actually fighting the combat because the AI was a step ahead of me having already finished the job by the time I got there. That said, the AI for your characters felt well designed as often they can feel lacking compared to yourself.

In between the exploration and the combat there is dialog which is perhaps the Noahmund’s best feature. The interactions between the characters are believable and the emotions come across pretty well especially when one is annoyed or distrustful of another. Another nice touch is that there’s also not only internal monologue, but that it comes across as actual silence making another wonder why they aren’t saying anything.

As if the rest wasn’t enough, Noahmund in a way is incomplete and some of the features left out are unacceptable. One such item is the opening cinematic which is simply in Spanish without any subtitles activated to let you know what is being said. Even then, half of my attempts to get the cutscene to render with English subtitles were unsuccessful as I went back more than once to double check. After this, if you explore enough of the beginning area there’s a backer zone that is also only written in Spanish. While I could have asked a friend to translate these for me, Noahmund is a fully releases title and for these portions to not be addressed sadly comes across as very lazy.

So for all of its great ideas, Noahmund falls very short and I’m sad because after seeing what it promised I was really excited for it. Now while it can still be improved upon and modified a little bit in order to make it a smoother experience, for right now, I’m sad to say that it falls very short of being what could have been a great title.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Estudio Ábrego
Publisher(s):
Estudio Ábrego
Shinyuden
Genre(s):
Real Time
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
N/A

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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