Note: I started playing and then gave up on all three of these games. For each, I played between three and fifteen hours before quitting. In each case, I reached a point where I had no desire to continue.
Octopath Traveller (2018)
Like a few other Square RPGs, the player can select from a range of different pixelated RPG people and choose which order to experience their story in. Then they run around the world, talking to villagers, opening treasure chests and exploring caves and woods. It's a Japanese role playing game that is trying extremely hard to be a Japanese role playing game, which is in itself a fascinating concept.
I selected Ophilia (groan inducing fantasy misspellings are the norm here) the Cleric, mainly because she was the first one I clicked on. It starts very slowly indeed, with a big exposition dump regardless of your choice of character. However, once I hit the first dungeon, the flow of combat stated to both make sense and became satisfying. It's fun, although not exactly world changing, (if a SNES RPG has ever, or should ever actually change the world) especially after Bravely Default did the whole 'classic RPG with knobs on' concept just a few years earlier.
Square have a history with making games with selectable characters and scenarios that can be played in a non-linear fashion. Saga Frontier, Live A Live, Treasure Of The Rudras all used this conceit. Yet while it's popular with Square I can't help but feel that it's a not particularly effective narrative technique. Eight characters is a lot, and there's a lot of superficial details to remember. Yet the characters are similar enough that this rarely becomes a serious issue.
Octopath Traveller's setup is a little different. After playing through a 'tale', which is somewhat demarcated though it's heavy use of dialogue, you then guide the character through a mini dungeon, then off in to then wilderness to find the next character and play their tale. The tales are somewhat generic. They are big on shmaltz and supposedly heartrending scenarios. It's a bit much. Along the way, you will find additional chapters for each character, which stops you from just playing all four chapters in a row, as was possible and even preferable in Treasure Of The Rudras. The overworld is not broken in to a distinct world map like in earlier Final Fantasy games, but instead is a little like Seiken Densetsu 3. In fact, the whole premise of the game's structure does seem rather similar to Seiken Densetsu 3. Just not as striking or as fun.
Octopath's big innovation is its 'path actions', which are eight little actions that can be used on NPCs as opposed the the standard JRPG 'talk'. Depending on who is in your party, you can conscript, beat up, rob, grill for information and even seduce unsuspecting townsfolk. It's distracting enough, but I feel that the time spent programming and implementing these could have been spent writing a more compelling story.
The game uses a number of regional dialects, much like the more recent Dragon Quest localisations. Unlike Dragon Quest, however, they are head meltingly bad, perhaps even beyond parody and charm. One town features a ghastly cod middle English to construct an olde-world atmosphere, that frankly is distracting at best, embarrassing at worst. Another uses utterly appalling faux cockney rhyming slang from someone who's clearly never been within a few thousand kilometres of London. The lack of care and consistency here is annoying, as it impedes immersion in the world and being able to empathise with the characters. Though, as with their 16-bit progenitors, personality is far more effectively constructed through the often lush, yet sadly undefined sprite work! There are some nice musical leitmotifs and a few rousing themes, but, again, nothing as exquisite as what as gone before.
Many of the characters story arcs are generic. In fact all of the charters story arcs are generic. Some are just plain boring, like Alfine the apothecary. Some are eyebrow raising, like Primrose, who bides her time as a sex worker so she might kill the man who killed her father. The tonal shifts are a little surprising. Especially Primrose's story, which was basically just exploitation. The episodic, standalone story arcs could have worked really well, as Dragon Quest has proved over and over, but everything feels a little limp here.
So, Octopath feels fragmented. Clearly this is by design, yet it needn't fragmented to this extreme. Each character is ultimately superficial, in terms of character design, narrative arc, dialogue, and the setting that anchors them. While it doesn't do anything wrong, its insistance on being compared to the undisputed classics of the 1990's unfortunately only underlines what a generic and flat experience this really is. However, as a test drive for a promising engine, Octopath fulfils a purpose. The news that this engine will soon be running oddball flexi-narrative classic Live-A-Live, as well as the outright adored Dragon Quest III is extremely exciting. I hope Octopath Traveller is ultimately seen as a formative dry run before the engine's true purpose is realised.
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry (2020)
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry is an authentically old and clunky feeling point and click adventure. It has obscure inventory puzzles and hidden object finding galore. In this sense, it's an excellent game, if, like me, you find there's nothing more comforting than playing dusty old adventure games with all their obnoxious idiosyncrasies, then there is absolutely nothing wrong here. It's stupid, frustrating and mechanically delightful.
However, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry is also absolutely vile, and almost nightmarishly unfunny. Watching this revolting little man trundle around the various run down and disgusting environments, touching various, convoluted innuendos and spouting nonsensical, hackneyed jokes that would be confusing even in 1987 is a mind destroying experience. It's not even 'saucy British comedy' level humour. An indicative joke: an early puzzle involves feeding an Instagram influencer trainted beer so she shits herself so you can scoop her shitted knickers out of a bin and then give them to a spotty nerd so that HE can set up your Tinder profile for you. I have a pretty strong stomach, as you can probably deduce from the vile films and books I write about on this blog, but this joke made we wince a little. Bravo, I suppose.
And yet the comedy is so stunted, bizarre, and retrograde in a way that can only be accomplished through a committed adherence to awfulness (and, frankly, lack of familiarity with the English language). Wet Dreams Don't Dry is a long way from being 'so bad it's good', but it does have an anarchic and bizarre refusal to engage with anything other that a commitment to delivering jokes about pubic hair at any possible cost. It's therefore comforting, not in the sense that it harks back to a time where political correctness was embraced and cherished, but instead it is comforting that something so gross and shitty could be made and could be so strangely popular, especially among German people.
Paper Mario: The Origami King (2020)
The Paper Mario series is, in effect, a continuation of a series that started with Super Mario RPG on the SNES. Combining light RPG elements with a few ragtag conventions of the mainline Mario series, the Mario RPG/Paper Mario series can be defined best through it's gentle postmodern mode of address, that sees its oddball cast of characters sigh, question their roles and get on with life anyway.
Paper Mario: The Origami King shares this delightful writing and the inviting world of the mushroom kingdom. Exploring the dayglo towns and other non-dungeon locales is a delight, and the game world has a joined up complexity that gives it a satisfying heft. It's not exactly Dark Souls, but discovering shortcuts and other secrets is immensely satisfying. And it's often very, very funny. It's worth playing through the entire game simply for this, and by this, I mean the parts of the game that are not related to combat. Because the combat, which is based around rotating various enemies and icons on a big ring is tedious and annoying. Tastes may vary, but it's distracting, lumpen, repetitive and very much not fun. It leads to an important question: just how essential is combat, even abstracted to this level, actually relevant in a videogame like this? The boss battles are particularly arduous, and I found myself using every possible shortcut to get through these bits as quickly as possible. The minutiae of running around, chucking confetti on holes and finding hidden toads is amiable and inviting, but the combat is distracting and frankly annoying. What a shame.