Terraria - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

With Re-Logic having finished their last major update for Terraria, my brother and I figured it was time to jump back in. We had previously gotten about halfway through it several years ago, but this time we were in it for the long haul, determined to start fresh with mediumcore characters and really sink our teeth into this cute, 2D Minecraftian adventure. It took a while—a lengthy 44 hours to be exact—but our journey was fun and thrilling, containing some really wild ups and downs. The critical thing I did not expect (and really should've in retrospect) was that the Terraria wiki would be an essential contributor in our victory over the game.

I suppose you could finish Terraria with nothing more than experimental mindset and some elbow grease, but hardmode will undoubtedly test that theory. For those that don't know, after descending into a literal hell to slay a fleshy monstrosity, new monsters, items, and features are added to the world to bring this once-explored land back to life—lovingly called "hardmode". I'm fairly certain I stopped here the last time I played because I definitely would've remembered the ass-whooping Terraria handed me had I tried to continue. Resilient enemies prowled the landscape, safe houses were frequently invaded, and the number of corpse runs I undertook had more than quadrupled.

Terraria does a decent job at directing you where to go by suggesting what your next achievement should be, but its mostly a breadcrumb of bosses to kill rather than gear to acquire. And once in hardmode you'll find your gear woefully underleveled, especially if you try to tackle one of the nasty mechanical bosses that can assault your base at night. Looking up how to spawn better ore, what enemies drop what components, and how to acquire wings and/or mounts are the first steps toward surviving—and the game does an abysmal job at telling you this. Hell, I'm not even sure if it tells you how to properly build a house that villagers can live in, let alone what triggers NPCs to finally sell pylons (which are the best way to travel across the overworld for like 90% of the game).

I sympathize a bit with Re-Logic on this issue; nearly every crafting-oriented game becomes so bloated with information and options that it's irresponsible to add a text box simply suggesting, "Player should make X armor and Y weapon". But this diminishes your sense of discovery since you're forced to stumble across most of the secrets on a wiki, instead of experiencing them yourself within the game's world. If you stubbornly refuse to do outside research, you'll find yourself staring slack-jawed at your inventory, oblivious that "soul of light" can be crafted into a boss-summoning totem at an anvil made from mythril, the second ore generated from every triplicate of altars destroyed. For the record, the first NPC that arrives does share a crafting list when you show him an item, but good luck learning where how to locate the other reagents (ah yes, to get an avenger emblem I have to farm an earlier boss I previously had zero reason to fight! Of course!)

There are definitely worse aspects in Terraria than having to do some wiki sifting, like its occasionally abysmal drop rate and the unwieldy UI that gets exponentially more cumbersome with mediumcore deaths. But at no point are any these bad enough to dissuade you from further playing. One of the coolest things that Terraria possesses that other games like Minecraft don't is an urge to evolve. You'll start the game deceptively humble, happy to craft an iron sword to replace your old copper one. But by the end your final state will be practically unrecognizable from how you started, a whirlwind of rockets and magic and spears and yo-yos flinging from your fingertips. Terraria explodes outwards in options as you progress through it, showering you in items that are as cool as they are delightfully stupid. The lack of self-seriousness gives the game a lot of charm, reminiscent of media melting pots that middle-schoolers often brew together. So what if you have orcs, martians, pirates, pixies, and disembodied lovecraftian eyes existing alongside one another? They're all cool! Bring on the pirate jacket and eyeball helmet!

I never really minded hardmode's dramatic ramp in difficulty, mainly because the sense of getting stronger is so well done in Terraria. Every play session starts and ends with you ruminating on your next objective. Slowly you'll work from point A to B to C, crafting a new armor set, grabbing extra health crystals, and discovering new equipment that makes you audibly "ooooh!" Blood moon events that once left you shaking in your boots become minor nuisances, and when the final boss falls you'll feel practically immortal, able to fend off literal armies while bathing in lava. If anything, the game will probably get a little too crazy by the end, transforming into a nonsensical shmup that's tremendously hard to parse. But you don't come to Terraria for its finely-tuned combat—you play it to learn its secrets and then slowly conquer it, biome by biome, boss by boss.

Similar to Destiny 2, another obfuscated game I adore, your experience will be significantly smoother playing with someone that knows what they're doing. When you're first stepping out into the unknown forests of Terraria's wilds, it can be a truly captivating journey—until you run into a wall and have no idea how to proceed. But check out the wiki and stick with it, because Terraria is about the ascension from a simple lumberjack to a gaudy deity capable of summoning unicorns, dragons, and UFOs to their aid, armed with Excalibur in one hand and a gun that shoots bees in the other. It's ludicrous, but reaching that level of absurdity is absurdly fun.

(Also there's a ton of mods and they look pretty cool.)

Destiny 2 - Thoughts

I barely spent any time with Destiny 2 when it was first released. I mean, I played enough to finish the main campaign, but what does that mean for a massively-multiplayer video game? I had no idea what reputation was used for, attached no mods, finished no exotic quests, and was nowhere near being raid-ready. I bounced off of it as quickly as I had for the first Destiny, finding the story pointlessly convoluted and the gameplay good... but not addicting. The only conclusion I could surmise is that the series just wasn't for me—and that was fine. There were plenty of other MMO/GaaS games in the sea.

... But when Destiny 2: New Light was released on Steam (for free), I jumped back in and got hooked. I put in a whopping 100 hours, purchasing both Forsaken and Shadowkeep. I finally got around to exploring all the missing bits of content I missed: Crucible, Gambit, Nightfall, Menagerie, dungeons (but not raids yet—it's been tough trying to organize them with friends). My vault is packed with exotics, my weapons and armor pieces kitted with mods, and I experienced the pain of grinding for Pinnacle Engrams firsthand. Yet despite knowing more about the game than I ever thought I would, the true nature of Destiny 2 continued to allude me.

What the hell was this game that I had sunk so much time into?

I mean, I get it—but I don't. And it's not a hard sentiment to understand if you've spent any time with Destiny 2. When you jump into New Light you're allowed to go wherever you want and play any mission you like, which makes the game more confusing than freeing. Like what should you do? What do you even want to do? The quality of your gear determines your level, so it's probably best to search for higher level equipment... but you can find it almost anywhere. Plus why are you trying to get better gear in the first place? Campaigns, adventures, and strikes are level-independent activities, and most PvP modes ignore level advantage altogether. The most obvious thing you'd need it for is the newest raid, but that requires five other players to group up without a matchmaking function, meaning it's probably not a priority for the amateur player. True, the raid is an objective, but so is killing Onyxia in World of Warcraft—and that game at least guides you towards that destination, whereas Destiny shows you a pamphlet on swimming and then flings you into the deep end.

This cavalier aimlessness is the central reason why Destiny had so much trouble getting its claws in me—and the lack of a strong narrative only made it worse. There are clever plot threads and diverse races interwoven throughout Destiny 2's tapestry, but Bungie purposely keeps its fabric vague and insubstantial. You're told you're a Guardian that owes its life to the Traveler thanks to the Light bequeathed to you, but none of those terms are well defined. There's some robots trying to rewrite reality and the remnants of an inter-dimensional king's army faffing about, but you never get a firm grasp on their motivation beyond "let's rule the universe." Ironically the plot in Destiny 2 is relayed in a much more considerate way than the first game (I honestly still have no idea what that one was about), but it's a far cry from the epic space fantasy the series wants to be. Characters will bark orders at you with resolve and urgency, but you won't really comprehend anything beyond "dark is bad."

So Destiny 2 is a hard game to get into. But it's also, without a doubt, the most aesthetically pleasing FPS I've ever played. From the satisfying "thunk" of a grenade launcher to the gorgeous skyboxes full of interstellar anomalies, Destiny 2 is covered in fine, sensuous details. Even the UI—as clunky as it may be—looks and feels unique, the sounds of swapping mods and popping engrams embedding themselves into the pleasure zone of your brain. The armor design is considerably varied so that you can look like anything from a pirate king to a long-forgotten astronaut, and I really like the shader system too, allowing your grossly mismatched gear to blend together effortlessly. 

Speaking of, the colors—the colors! Destiny 2's visuals are cohesive despite every planet wielding its own vibrant palette, like the oppressive orange sandstorms of Mars, the crushing green tidal waves of Titan, and the resplendent gold of the mighty Leviathan. The architecture is just as memorable, utilizing a lot of simple geometric shapes for Vex shrines and rigid, mucus-y metal for the Hive dens. The Earth and Cabal stuff are good too, but they're extremely mundane compared to zones like The Dreaming City and its ghostly capital. The aesthetics of Destiny 2 are so captivating that my main motivator for playing was to witness more of its world. That's not to say the gameplay is bad either—shooting stays captivating for hours on end—it's just that there's not really any FPS that captures the scope and grandeur of an alien world quite like Destiny.

Even if you enjoy being a tourist in Destiny 2's gorgeous universe, eventually you're going to want a goal to strive towards. The game is loaded with repeatable bounties and adventures, but the most structure is derived from trying to complete its various Exotic (ie rare weapon) quests. But here is where you'll run into one of the most novel-yet-frustrating aspects about Destiny: it's esotericism. Questlines are plentiful, disorganized, and stupidly vague, often just pointing you in a random direction with a single riddle to guide your way. Some of the bigger, more impressive quests (like the Whisper of the Worm) you'll have to research how to access, and quests with unique level designs are unfortunately few and far between. Plus due to the fact that you'll be playing several seasons of content simultaneously, you're bound to get a stack of quests that'll be impossible to parse the value of—do you even want the gun that's at the end of this quest line? Do you know what to do to get its catalyst (ie final upgrade)? Do you know what the objective on the catalyst is?

Like a lot of MMOs, you'll spend a chunk of time outside of the game researching things: build guides, how power level specifically affects you, and the frequent "how the hell do I get this quest/item/heroic event?" Eventually the annoyance will fade and you'll come to accept that this is simply what Destiny 2 is. Don't get me wrong—it can still feel vexing—but having to dig in order to uncover the game's cooler aspects can be... kind of neat? At least for me it was; the unorthodox design extends all the way into its level structure, going as far as to incorporate confounding oddities like a secret NES-style password system in one of the raids. The PvP Crucible is probably the best mode since it's the most straightforward one (plus it's actually endlessly replayable), but uncovering the game's weird secrets is personally the most rewarding activity available. Even Destiny's strange reliance on platforming and shortcuts in some of their quests (like Outbreak Perfected) has tickled my curiosity more than most games have in years.

No matter what you're playing the game for, the core loop of Destiny 2 distills down into three things: gathering Exotic (and sometimes Legendary) weapons, gradually raising your power level, and hoping to find better stats on your favorite gear drops. The game is still wildly aimless—how you accomplish each of these is largely up to you—but you'll come to define all your actions in one of these three ways. And it's... weird, personally, to play a game where the ultimate objective is to keep you on a treadmill running forward, hoping you're hungry enough to savor every crumb of progression that's doled out. I realize most games utilize this kind of incremental-power engine, but here it's so naked and disappointing that I can't look past it. I mean, am I really going to play this for 100 more hours in the hopes of finding something as meaningless as boots with high Discipline and Recovery? Because it feels like that's my only choice.

Destiny 2 operates on a seasonal model where new content and story developments are rotated in every ten weeks, which should give you new reasons to play. But even if you pay for the ridiculous seasonal pass ($10 for access to a temporary event and bounties?!), it doesn't provide you with better endgame material—it just makes the treadmill run a tiny bit easier. The juicy PvE content I thirst for (Master Ordeals, new dungeons) come out at a grossly infrequent rate and lack matchmaking, turning them into a greater challenge than I bargained for. And since the game doesn't accommodate for solo or duo teams, I end up having to wait until I can blast through them at vastly higher light levels (like the Pit of Heresy). What's crazy to me too is that Destiny 2 includes a item modifier the player can use to adjust the difficulty level and special conditions of PvE events, but it only works for Nightfalls! Why Bungie? Why must you do this to me?

Whenever I think about Destiny 2, a thousand thoughts zoom through my mind and collide like a turbulent asteroid belt: It's cool! Annnd it's weird! And some of the design choices are really baffling! But it's so beautiful! Wait, do I really have to keep playing the same content over and over? At least the enemies are diverse. A shame that the bosses are just bigger regular enemies though. How the hell do I get this "Recluse" everyone talks about? Woah, the Darkness is coming in these dope pyramids! Or the pyramids... are the Darkness? Hold up, what is the Darkness? Et cetera, et cetera.

This colliding jumble of impressions and questions keeps me from reaching a consensus on Destiny 2... but they also urge me to return every now and then. I'm not sure that's a good thing—I inevitably find myself left speechless at how confusing and uncommunicative its content is—but the best thing I can say about Destiny is that it is wholly unique. Despite coming from a big, well-loved studio, there's not really another game you can compare it to. Nowhere will you find a more peculiar blend of majestic artistry, convoluted storytelling, excellent gunplay, divisive platforming, and repetitive content than in Destiny 2. Again, I'm not sure this is a good thing, but Bungie will always have my attention when it comes to this franchise—for better or worse.

Super Metroid Phazon - Thoughts

It is nearly impossible to re-capture what made the original Super Metroid so special. So much of the game is immersed in nostalgia, and what isn't is difficult to quantify and explain. There's a je ne sais quoi to its world and atmosphere—familiarity and alienation are masterfully blended together, forming a curious stew that you can never quite identify the ingredients of. And for the most part, a lot of Super Metroid rom hacks approach this untouchable recipe with strict reverence: weapon progression is similar, zones feel roughly the same, and your journey will always end with the player blasting Mother Brain to bits. But Super Metroid Phazon eschews with the formal, seeking to hone in on something that Metroid fans love but don't frequently emulate:

Weirdness.

Now, of course there's a lot of ugly, oddball hacks out there, but what those fail to understand is that Metroid has always had a sort of... dignified weirdness. The fauna is unnatural (if not a bit quirky) and the zones are colorful, but nothing is mismatched, nonsensical, or garish; a bright pink mossy almost makes sense coexisting next to a ruddy stone shaft. Metroid unnerves but never repels, and Super Metroid Phazon respectfully understands this concept. Not only does it shake up the typical Super Metroid item and boss progression, but it tugs at player expectations with its eerie alien ambition.

First, you'll awake as Dark Samus inside of a malfunctioning capsule, mere steps away from a free energy tank and an empty red door on the ceiling. Rather than run across the surface of an alien planet in search of the morph ball, you'll dive through underwater passageways, climb frozen cliffsides, and dart past a boss for your first missile pack. Soon you'll uncover a big room that displays a picture of all the areas in the game, your next destination indicated by a small flashing dot. You won't find maps to download, a ship to recharge at, or item hints on the minimap. And as you collect beam powerups, you'll find your arm cannon gets slower—rather than stronger—when the beams are stacked. While Super Metroid Phazon may look familiar, it doesn't feel familiar in the slightest.

What really helps differentiate it from a lot of other Metroid hacks is the visual presentation. Super Metroid Phazon brings with it a massive graphical overhaul, changing nearly every enemy, every zone, and even the UI itself. Caverns, phazon groves, and underwater trenches look realistic and beautiful at times, while the massive complexes of Tetrafuse are unsettling and inexplicable. The entire world of SR217 is infested with snakelike piping, protected by strange machinery that rarely resembles anything humanoid. The bosses themselves have really excellent sprites (Kraid in particular), their attack patterns the only indicator of what they once were. In fact, if there's one thing from Phazon I'm likely to remember, it's how bizarrely rectangular most of its enemies were.

Besides the new coat of paint, the most memorable aspect of Super Metroid Phazon is how massive the world is. My run-time clocked in at a total of 7:24 with only 77% of the items obtained, and (at least I thought) I was pretty thorough. A good chunk of time was spent hunting down the Prime-esque collectibles required to reach the final area (an interesting addition), as well as traversing the land since the screens themselves are also gargantuan. The Tetrafuse towers are mechanical mountains to explore, and the lower depths of the Sewers is one of the coolest journeys: it goes on forever and is mostly empty. "Vacancy" may not sound like much of a compliment, but plunging down to its dark, aquatic depths will make you feel insignificant and alone, eager to find signs of life (or missiles!) amidst the coral.

There's really not much criticism I have to offer for Super Metroid Phazon, as I really dug its aesthetic and direction. If anything, I feel the first half of the game where you're brilliantly strung along from powerup to powerup is the strongest, and sniffing out the Prime-collectibles in the second half not only lacks difficulty but is a bit too aimless (I accidentally missed the final beam powerup). I wouldn't say Phazon overstayed its welcome, but for as cool as the long trek through cavernous rooms are the first time, they're plainly exhausting on revisit. Warp points thankfully mitigate this issue, but you should still prepare your legs for a hefty workout.

If Super Metroid is one of your favorite games, I implore you to give Super Metroid Phazon a try. It's not a major overhaul that retools enemy AI or adds cool new items, but it deftly transcends the typical "second quest" trope a lot of hacks fall into. From the great new visuals to the completely new world, Phazon feels like an alternate dimension parallel to Super Metroid—or maybe more aptly, a third party stand alone sequel. It plays around with the Metroid formula and succeeds, creating a tantalizing soup to Super Metroid's special stew.