Dungeon Encounters

Dungeon Encounters is the first game on my Drudge List I'm marking as "Abandoned." In fact, it inspired me to give myself permission to abandon titles so long as I still write something about the experience. I am not writing about how abandoning games is good, I'm insecure about my own work-ethic and being perceived as lazy and monologuing online about how good it is not to ever finish anything is, in fact, one of the things that drove me off Twitter. However, if I am going to invoke the idea of Work Ethic when describing a pursuit of leisure I may be hinting to myself about how much fun I'm actually having.

Dungeon Encounters was developed and published by Square Enix for a worldwide release on October 14, 2021 for the Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation and PC. According to the Steam Store description Dungeon Encounters comes

From some of the key development team behind the legendary FINAL FANTASY franchise, DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS is a dungeon exploration RPG where you must strategize to survive. The streamlined interface gives you the freedom to prepare and manage your party as you strive to reach the final floor.

The word "streamlined" in this quote is being used with modesty. The play action in Dungeon Encounters begins with the grid. The map is the territory.

Aside from a bit of atmospheric soundscaping and some texture and color in the background, all you see of the Dungeon you're exploring is a clean, bold grid of squares, not unlike what you might outline on graph paper yourself were you to play a different dungeon crawler, one focused on first-person play. Here we have our character model running briskly from square to square. Most of these squares hold nothing beyond their function as a place to stand. Squares that do contain a play event or location will only contain one. A staircase up or down, a shop, a teleporter, a healing spring, a monster battle, et cetera. These squares are marked with a two-character alphanumeric code which you'll pick up on so easily you won't need a glossary. The dungeon, the entire game, is a seemingly endless stack of these various grid maps (in fact, there are 99.) The first floor has only a downward staircase, the last floor has only an upward staircase, the rest have both. This is the universe, spartan and contained. Edwin Abbott Abbott wouldn't be mad.

It should be stated that aesthetically the experience is one almost entirely typographical. Aside from the character and monster portraits and the characters 3D models which rush hither and thither over the map squares all the representational elements are type and boxes. When I say staircase I mean a map square which reads "01." When I say Healing Spring I mean a map square reading "06."" There is no world map, there are no quests, there are no NPC villagers, nor mounts, nor crafting, nor crystal MacGuffin, not a single, solitary princess.

Dungeon Encounters appealed to me solely for its total dedication to trimming the fat and precision focus on its core experience. I honestly adore its sparseness and economy of graphics. There is no character dialog, there is no story except for what you find in the labyrinth or what you find in the brief but tantalizing character bios.

Coming from a company as Chuck E. Cheese-esque as Square Enix this display of restraint is downright Olympian.

So what does it have? Well, there's a fine little battle system. Battles in Dungeon Encounters are turn-based, they use Square's old Active Time Battle (ATB) system but this can be turned off. Every combatant begins with a physical and magical shield which must be broken through before attacks can lower HP. In the case of your party members these shields refill at the start of every encounter, meaning that smart fighting will allow your team to take hits regularly without constantly having to heal. It also means most monsters require two hits, one to take out the shield and the other to take out the HP. This grates. Even with the battle speed turned all the way up the double hit becomes so tedious and woe to you if your attack falls just a few points short of depleting an enemy's shield, now that enemy will require an entire extra turn to take out and if your next attacker has a particularly potent weapon equipped that perhaps you would have preferred to use for the HP, well…

These little circumstances were never fatal for my party. A Total Party Kill (TPK) is rare and results in sending your perspective and control back to square 00, "The Academy," to build a new team of level 01 characters. All the characters are unique meaning they are finite and if you kill every playable party member, well, that's a Game Over for the whole save file. Harsh, but I actually like that. I like it when games stick to their guns.

Anyway, it's these little moments of frustration, or rote, exhausted A-pressing that drove my soft hands away from the course, rugged inputs.

Truly, I love the sparseness, the cleanliness of it. The tabletop roleplaying gamer in me likes it when there are high stakes and low complications. But when I play Dungeon Encounters I don't feel like I'm strategizing my plan of approach to conquer various monsters or challenges, I feel like I'm working a conveyor belt. And I know the gameplay loop is never going to change. I confirmed this by watching a Let's Play of the title. You just keep going until you reach floor 99. I put about 35 hours across two different play attempts, both never reaching further than floor 29. This is maddening, unacceptable.

And for the record I have worked a conveyor belt before and let me tell you something it ain't worth doing unless you're being paid.

Persona 3: Re-Loaded

I must imagine the protagonist of Persona 3 happy. I worry he doesn't like what I'm making him do. Focus all night on a single arcade game or go sing karaoke alone every afternoon for a week.

I played the entirety of Persona 3: FES once — wrote a yatch of an essay about it.

Alas, abandoned right before the final boss.

Cave Story

So loud and frantic. I don't miss you but I miss the idea of you. I want to relish the laptoppy vibe of the DOT exe-ness of you. I shouldn't have played Undertale first. But there was no one tell me not to. Maybe I'll try the console fancy version one day, but how could I resist the free, Aeon Genesis translated jank version?

Felt like someone else's nostalgia to play. Like someone else's formative love. Goodnight, Cave Story.

Before the Green Moon

Never made it to the moon. Just scratched at the Earth a while.

The farming mechanics are half-baked and simple. Sometimes creators like to ride on their aesthetic in order not to have to have as much technical polish or elegance in their construction. Sometimes tone and aesthetic become cover for an unsophisticated construction, a lovely coat of paint on a structurally dubious bridge. I'm sorry, but it does happen. And if you've been guilty of the same thing in the past you start to feel like you can smell it when someone else does the same. Before the Green Moon smells like that to me.

I was pulled in by the "Moon Remix RPG 64" aesthetic, but lost on the lack of engagement. Cutscenes are obviously flagged in a couple different ways, interactions and in-game calendar dates it seems but would trigger one after another sometimes, leading to a feeling of railroading. Like, I wasn't unlocking the story through roleplay or curiosity but rather the game was taking my hand and leading me.

And where it led me were scenes of NPCs talking to each other in front of me. Usually, I would say it's just as important to observe characters in dialog as it is to be in dialog with them. However, in a sim-type game like this I would be able to select which other residents of the little world I'm hanging out with. If there were a larger cast of folks in this village the designers may have allowed me to do just that. As it is I can't avoid Int or more heavily focus on the diner guy or Marie.

Whatever it is with this game that's got me I think has something to do with how difficult it is to have fun as a farmer.

Obviously we're doing a little critique of capital with the story, farm economy, etc. However, there's some dissonance that eventually lead me away from finishing. What makes the mechanics of modern farming games tick and the theme and tone of the game are at odds.

In the farming action we are doing stuff that emphasizes personalization. You choose what you want to plant and when. You can raise chickens instead of rice if you want. You can plant the whole field with cheaper seeds or go all out with trees. Your self-directed experience bears upon every choice you make, tactics and strategy. You even decide how much money to put away for your ticket to the moon.

Attached to the personalization choices you make at the farm is also the ease of the fantasy of farming. Hoeing and planting takes about two minutes. All plants are ready to grow in less than a week. They are promptly ready for harvesting and there are never any duds so long as you water them. The prices for goods do not fluctuate—nothing fluctuates actually! It's like the fallacy people bring to the tough action games.

A player might say, "this tough action game is like real life because you have to work for your accomplishments." Well, ok. But you might say instead "This tough action game is a fantasy because your hard work is guaranteed to pay off, unlike in real life where hard work can easily be taken for granted and go unthanked or even be exploited."

In Before the Green Moon your hard work is neither rewarding nor exploited. It's just a part-time job, a bunch of tasks. And like any job you don't always get a choice with what coworkers you hang out with and sometimes the pay isn't even what you thought it'd be. Well, I quit.

Fire Emblem

I'm referring here to the North American release of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade for the Game Boy Advance. I liked it! I learned the weapon triangle, I figured out good uses for my various units. I mourned the unrequited gay love more or less entwined throughout all the character interactions. I even learn the ASL signs for the weapon triangle.

I blame my sedentary lifestyle for it ending up on the Abandoned list. Listen, it's summer in Atlanta and I'm unemployed, there's so little incentive to leave the house! I started the game and had the most enjoyment while on vacation. Fitting in a sortie here and there during the downtime of a busy day is the best way to experience this game. It's designed to be a handheld game.

This explains why it was hard to continue into the second half (half?) of the game once I was back home. I want to sit with my beautiful Analogue Pocket in an unfamiliar coffeeshop, sipping some kind of carbonated espresso experiment while cheerfully arranging my units and gazing out the wide window at a charming street in a seaside city. I do not want to sit with my beautiful Analogue Pocket in a painfully familiar bedroom, drinking room temperature coffee while cheerlessly arranging my units and gazing at my own clock radio. I do not hold Intelligent Systems responsible for this lot. (Although, after seeing Fire Emblem: Engage I think they might need to change the company name.)

Maybe this acts as kind of an explanation of why I am abandoning this game which I definitely enjoy. However, isn't there something else going on? I see it in forum comments and the thumbnails of YouTube videos… playing games is harder now. Right? Isn't it? I keep thinking it's just me. I'm stir-crazy at home waiting for my life to pick back up. We don't currently own a sofa, just two darling, chintz armchairs that destroy my knees. I have choice paralysis due to my home having too many devices that play video games. But I'm not the only one so, what it is?

I don't know what it is. I just know that I want to play more Fire Emblem and the time I spend thinking about playing compared to the time the game actually spends in my hands... I could finish it and so much more.

Forager

I watched a video about some factory building game during a depressive episode and thought "Yeah, I could go for some crack." I'm smart enough not to pay for my own drugs so Forager on my boyfriend's Xbox Game Pass account would suffice.

Forager really helped me to understand something about gambling addicts I never got before: why play slot machines when they are so, so ugly to look at?

I found Forager quite hideous. It looks to me like all those flat, over-saturated Stardew Valley clones. Where pixel art is being rendered like any other graphics resulting in spinning, distorted pixels betraying the creators' apparent lack of understanding or concern for how pixel graphics are actually displayed. Warped paper cutouts rather than a shifting mosaic. It was wretched in the Pokémon games on the DS and it's wretched in the indie scene now. Maybe I'm too particular, too Art School; but if I am to stare at something for a long time it just can't offend me like that.

Unless it's addicting. When something is addictive all those harsh aesthetic frippery and cheapness loses impact. I stop seeing the gross blobbing sprites and start just pressing the reward button. I know what I was getting into; not an aesthetic experience, nor intellectual, emotional, or joyful. Merely a clock-quickening daze.

There is one uplifting part of the experience that's actually quite good and noteworthy. The developer, a lone creator-type, inserted a lengthy, illustrated, story about how the game came to be and the difficulties he overcame to create it. It was sweet, and interesting, and when he took his mom out to dinner I was so happy for them. But, that's not the game.

The game is a part-time job that pays you in missed hours. One I was happy to soon quit.