Bloodborne: A Plea to Play

          I will be surprised if Bloodborne is not my game of the year, not that the distinction has any particular meaning.  It really is amazing though; it requires skills I pride myself on like caution, observation, and reflexes, and the world is rich and dripping with atmosphere.  If you're open to a gothic/Lovecraftian aesthetic (spoiler warning), and don't mind a steep and somewhat unforgiving difficulty curve, then Bloodborne will slake your thirst.

         I first played Demon's Souls, one of Bloodborne's progenitors, a handful of years ago, and I had no idea what I was doing.  Certainly, if there is a major flaw to From Software's hack-and-slash fantasy series, it's the barrier to entry.  The game attempts to explain its basic premises, but a lot of it relies on the player already having a certain knowledge base.  The tutorials are insufficient.  I like how the game teaches a lot of its workings and doesn't feel the need to handhold, but text-dump tutorials are generally bad design.  Even in Dark Souls, probably my favourite game, it took me a terribly long time to learn how to aim a bow.

But Demon's Souls.  I must have tried that first level nearly twenty times before even making it to the boss, and I can remember the absolute frustration that came with it.  It takes a while to get into the mindset these kinds of games require, which is something I forget too often when recommending them.  These are not small commitments.  Unless you are a veteran of the series and playstyle, you can't just have fun for twenty minutes to relax.  Try Skyrim, or Bejewled, those are both great for it.

Side note: That's not a crack against Bejeweled or Skyrim.  You want to relax and feel good for a bit?  Both will satisfy that need.

But is Bloodborne worth that commitment?  Yes, a thousand times yes.  The games can be frustrating and impenetrable, but the world, story, and design are so rich and deep that it far outweighs the loss.  Please play a Souls game, whichever you can get your hands on, and really give it your all.  You'll hit a wall, everyone does, but there is no shame in asking for help or needing a walkthrough.  However you need to get through the game, you should do it, because eventually you'll come out the other side,  and when you look back and see the trail of perseverance you left behind, you will feel stronger for it, more able, like you've taken away something great.

Brave Fencer Musashi: For Lack of Memory

I remember this game.  Or I thought I did.  I remember renting it from Blockbuster, and keeping my Playstation on all night because I didn't own a memory card.  I never got past the first boss.  I had no idea what I was doing.  But I remember it being epic, broad.  A mighty swordsman slicing his way through a swatch of soldiers and fire, finding a magical sword and battling great monsters.

I was... mistaken.  That tiny lens of nostalgia has come up a few times in this list already, such as with A Link to the Past.  All I remembered about that game was that magnificent opening screen.  A mystical golden triforce, a magical land, and a sacred blade of power and truth.

Brave Fencer Musashi is goofy.  As the Allucaneet Kingdom battles the Thirstquencher Empire, the mighty swordsman and little kid Musashi is summoned to defeat the Thirstquenchers, and hijinks ensue.  The game is honestly pretty funny, or at least the dialogue is.  Every character has a comedic tick of some kind (although it occasionally relies on sadly reductive stereotypes), which range from just strange to very funny.  The translation must have been quite the task, but it's one of the best in a time where it just wasn't that great.

But the game.  It's frustrating.  It's the Playstation doing everything it can to have a grand and varied story and environments, but it just doesn't succeed.  There are portions of the game I found profoundly frustrating, and the amount of complexity they add in the form of night-day cycles, day-specific events, and hunger and sleep stats.  It's one of those games that reminds me of the importance of manuals in that day, and the present day necessity of thorough tutorials.

In fact, Brave Fencer Musashi is a game that seems to be trying too many things with little regard for the more established and understandable kind of design.  There's a mechanic where you can steal powers from your enemies in order to solve puzzles, but it's not like there's a tutorial for each one.  And while experimentation can be fun, it's really easy to get overwhelmed by constantly respawning enemies and the lethal environment.

Brave Fencer is trying to work too many angles at once.  It's not able to achieve the Game Loaf style of Yakuza 3, but still good benefit from focusing its gameplay a lot more.  I mean, a power stealing mechanic sounds awesome.  And it could have been something as awesome as Kirby crossed with Gauntlet Legends, but it can't stop wanting to be so much more.

It's not the kind of game I really recommend seeking out.  It's worth watching a let's play to see the best scenes and see what I mean about the potential, but there's not anything that transcendental.  Again, the translation manages to be really funny and clever, even with the heavy censoring I understood it had.  Brave Fencer Musashi was I game not recommended to me, but one I put on this list for myself, and it seems like my nostalgia let me down.  We'll see how often it does over the year.