Anthem - Thoughts

What is Anthem? And what does it want to be?

To anyone that's played a modicum of Destiny, the answer is simple: Destiny. Some may argue that it's an inflammatory comparison, that not "every shooter with a GaaS model is Destiny!" but there's no use denying it. Anthem was designed as EA's multiplayer, always-online looter-shooter, the perfect rival to Bungie's baby. Yet in a way, there is more—so much more—to Anthem than that. There's a big sci-fi fantasy world, and awesome mech suits, and flying, and a combo system, and a bunch of other elements that shuffle off the Destiny comparisons. But Anthem isn't really any of those things either. 

No, it's something worse; Anthem is something that no game wants to be...

For the most part, Anthem is fully playable, as well as fully enjoyable. As of April 2021 (the month I played it), you can jump in with squadmates, pick a class, blast through story missions and strongholds, and find plenty of gear for your javelin. All of Anthem's features exist in theory, but after playing for a dozen hours, they'll all feel a little... off. The biggest issue is that since the game is no longer actively supported, its player base is dying. You'll get stuck in matchmaking to end up with nobody, and then forcibly assigned partners in spaces where you don't want them—specifically freeplay mode, aka "just run around and collect stuff". And similar to Destiny, Anthem's more difficult, late-game content is nearly impossible to get through solo, which drives the nail further into the coffin.

Since I never really dabbled in Anthem's lategame content, I can't speak to how satisfying it is once it's been mastered. But I didn't have the drive or desire to do so either; finishing the main story and strongholds were all I really cared about, and in that regard Anthem manages to impress roughly 10-20% of the time. I think it has a decently strong start and that the javelin suits are well designed and varied, but after a couple hours Anthem is stuck spinning its wheels in the mud. Its singular overworld feels subdued and samey, its mission variety sorely lacking, and most of enemies are forgettable. Even worse is that killing said enemies lacks fanfare, so you're never really sure if a target you've attacked is dead or close to it. Destiny comparisons may get overwrought by the end of this entry, but if enemy death animations is something Bungie got right, then Anthem shows how to make it feel "wrong."

The biggest piece of praise I can heap on Anthem is how short your ability cooldowns are, allowing you to use your coolest skills multiple times over a single encounter. And unlike Destiny, these aren't just flavored variations of "grenade" or "melee strike"—each suit has multiple abilities that vie for the left and right bumper slots, as well as several armor components that can enhance your damage. While this all sounds cool, Anthem inexplicably commits a "looter" sin by locking your loadout for any mission you undertake. So you can't quickly compare weapons or even see what loot you've acquired until you return back to base, which entails a hefty load screen and pointless "XP acquired" ceremony. To anyone that thinks traveling to the Tower in Destiny is a painstaking process, imagine having to go there every time you wanted to equip a single piece of gear.

Being able to wield nifty javelin abilities unfortunately comes with a dark side: your firearms stink. As the interceptor class, I had the most fun chucking high damage glaives and spamming melee to cleave through multiple opponents. When I couldn't do either I was left to rely on my weapons, which were frequently changing as I was leveling up. Sometimes I would find a good shotgun, and then a terrible shotgun, and then a terrible pistol, and then a mediocre rifle. Sometimes the game would hand me a weapon that, despite being higher level than everything else, did less damage than a single tap of my melee button. The firearms often felt lacking, partially due to the javelin abilities outshining them, but also because you can find a dull, gray, slow-reloading sniper rifle in almost every other shooter on the market.

Flying around in Anthem is another one of the game's strengths, though it comes with its own nonsensical drawback in the form of an overheat meter. Denying the player the ability to fly/float makes sense in some encounters and settings, but the gradually-building overheat meter makes little sense as a mechanic, since all you have to do is land for a brief two seconds to deplete it. That means your exploration will be repeatedly interrupted by a need to stop for an insignificant amount of time, which can wear on you akin to fishing pennies out of your wallet. Flying straight downwards can help cool your jets, but it's not nearly as effective as just landing for two seconds and then taking off again. Smarter game designers might find ways to make this mechanic interesting, but Anthem leaves it as an irritating afterthought.

Besides the snazzy javelin skills and free roam flying, there isn't really much else Anthem offers the player. You'd think with the narrative pedigree behind BioWare that Anthem's story would at least be compelling, but like Destiny it's just kind of... there. Characters exist to funnel you into repeatable missions, the game's vague terminology never receives any clarity, and the decisions you make result in arbitrary faction rep and nothing else. At times you can see BioWare's trademark charm in the captivating facial animations, but for the most part Anthem is an entirely forgettable affair with an entirely predictable story. It's something one might've predicted coming out of Guerilla Games pre-Horizon, not BioWare post-Mass Effect.

There's a host of other issues surrounding the game, including the more damning mission-breaking bugs, latency affecting combat, and frequent crashes, but nothing vexed me more than the infuriating "treasure hunting" halfway through the story. At this point Anthem is trying to familiarize players with its world, tasking them with a list of objectives to complete, one of which is to find 15 treasure chests. But these secretive caches are not easy to find, and are prone to already being opened by other players in freeplay mode, which—need I remind you—cannot be played solo. So your best bet is to do world events over and over, which gets old fast. Again, I understand the intention here, but the quest could've worked as a mere 5 quests, instead of bloating your playtime by two hours with the most boring content in the game.

See, this is the problem with Anthem in a nutshell: it's good enough that I can't imagine anyone hating the game, but it has so many issues that I can't imagine anyone actively wanting to play it. Maybe I'm being too harsh, my judgment clouded by the fact that EA has abandoned the title, but I'm not sure having a stable community would change my opinion. I think Anthem is decent enough but (for the third time this entry) it's largely forgettable, being brought down by a host of little issues that culminate into one big "I can't believe this is what BioWare spent their time making." It's fluid and flashy but ultimately hollow, requiring too much grinding for too little content; the first few hours after you get your javelin are where Anthem is at its best, and that might honestly be all you need to play if you're interested.

So, have you figured out the answer to "What is Anthem?" There's a clue at the very top of this post: it's the logo picture I used.

True—I could've chosen the vibrant, official logo from Bioware for the Anthem titlecard... but I didn't. That's because the logo you see up above is the same as the one you see in game; this is what Bioware presents their pet project as. It's partially finished, hidden behind patches and faulty wires, with the promise of "fun stuff coming soon!" somewhere off in the distance. You can hop in your mech suit and enjoy what's there, but it won't last; slowly Anthem will eat at you, and you'll be left wondering what there is to do or why you're even still playing. The half-built logo foretells what you'll come to learn, sourly, in due time: Anthem is a competent mess, despite desperately not wanting to be one.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

It didn't take long for me to conclude that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is my favorite in the franchise. I'm admittedly not too well-versed in the series—I've only played four out of its staggering sixteen entries—but Three Houses makes an impressive argument that I'm not sure the other games could beat. Every Fire Emblem since the NES debut has generally followed the same formula: take control a ragtag band of heroes as you fight back against an evil empire, with the infamous catch that any hero that falls in battle is gone for good. And while Three Houses very much keeps this premise alive, the way it goes about executing it makes the game the most approachable—and complex!—Fire Emblem to date.

The biggest (and most contentious) upheaval Fire Emblem: Three Houses brings to the series is a Persona-styled "Free Time" system that rules gameplay between battles. During Free Time, you'll complete miscellaneous chores around the school that can give your units extra stats and gear—which might sound minor, but will end up occupying half of your total playtime. This probably sounds boring to those that haven't played Persona or Animal Crossing, but there's a trove of satisfaction found in gradually improving your students and picking out which duties are important for you. While some chores inevitably become rote (prepare to hear the same lunch conversations over and over), your leisure time in Three Houses rarely feels slow or meaningless. If anything, "Free Time" adds more weight to the end-of-month battles, as those are where your fruits of your labor will (hopefully) pay off.

It's easy to look at how "modernized" the series has become and assume combat has gotten gentler, but Three Houses refutes that sentiment wholeheartedly. The game not only presents a stiff challenge (on Hard) but also hands the players plenty of tools to customize their army, adding multiple layers to your preparation. Along with the typical weapon loadout, there are equippable items, battalions, gambits, combat arts, adjutants, crests, and a class system where any character can promote into a class of their choosing—provided they meet certain requirements. Having skipped the series from the Wii release and onwards, you can imagine how robust Three Houses felt for me, especially considering that Fire Emblem's age-old gameplay pillar of "who fights whom?" isn't really lacking. Throw in some unique map gimmicks and gargantuan monsters that require team-wide coordination, and I'd contest that Three Houses emerges as the most strategic game in the franchise.

If that seems daunting to newcomers, note that Fire Emblem: Three Houses includes some much-needed accessibility options—namely the rewind mechanic and the ability to disable permadeath. Both aren't new to this entry but they're welcome improvements that can win over curious onlookers, as well as being completely optional features which hardcore vets can ignore. I personally think permadeath makes Fire Emblem a better, more memorable series, but I recognize that some folks might just want to hang out with their anime friends and forego the gut-wrenching panic that enemy crits induce. Admittedly, I found myself occasionally using the rewind mechanic to undo poorly thought-out moves too. In my defense the game is long enough without having to restart battles from scratch!

If there's something Fire Emblem: Three Houses struggles with, it's its visuals. Character portraits and their models are gorgeous, but the entire backdrop to the game—textures, locales, lighting—feel dated, if not lacking. At times it comes across as a remaster of a 3DS game, marred by too much empty space and a strict adherence to orthogonal angles. These issues don't really develop into nuisances however; Three Houses' visuals simply aren't impressive, and that's the worst part about them. Thankfully, the tremendous score more than makes up for the mediocre graphics, and the voice acting is top notch, especially for a dubbed game.

To tie this (mostly) masterful package together is a cast of lovable characters that will entangle you in some difficult decisions. As mentioned before, Fire Emblem games have always been about fighting oppressive, cartoonishly-evil empires, but Three Houses adds a beautiful twist to this formula. At the start of the game you'll pick one of three cliques to support, and then the other two are cruelly (but logically) morphed into your antagonists. Smartly, it waits to twist this knife until at least a third of the way through the story, letting you grow attached to each of the students in the opening hours before revealing what side of the war they're fighting on. It hurts having to dispatch of some of them, because you've talked with them, spent time with them, and come to understand they're not terrible people—they're just a roadblock on the path to justice.

Foes becoming friends is an old trick in the Fire Emblem playbook, which is what helps makes the inverse feel that much more surprising. On top of that, the schism between the titular three houses is due to ideology and methodology, instead of base desires or naked greed. Three Houses is surprisingly nuanced, laden with pained history that will have you arguing with real-life friends and strangers whether or not your house was justified in their actions. And the brilliant part is that no matter which path you choose, your perspective will always be that of the hero and liberator. Three Houses echoes that history is written by the victors, and that the larger the revolution, the larger the cost.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses knocks it out of the park on almost every front. Besides the visuals, the only other quibble I can think of is that some of the Battalion gambits are too powerful, as they can quickly change the tide of battle for both you and your enemies. But at least that ends up becoming a tactical consideration, just like picking your weapons or choosing which characters get to deliver the killing blow. Three Houses makes the series more personable with the "Free Time" system, as well as more approachable with the rewind ability. And series vets need not worry as the game doubles down on tough decisions you'll have, both on the battlefield and off. It is the best of both worlds; it is the best Fire Emblem game ever made; it has the best narrative Nintendo will (likely) ever produce.