Last Game You Finished and Your Thoughts MKII

Argh. So close to being the definitive Pokémon game by a considerable distance. The care stuff/Pokémon Refresh destroys the series-long dalliance with ludonarrative dissonance (hi, EDGE fans ) and, I would say, meaningfully. A lot of thought has been put in to the player experience and making things simple for us; that may have tipped slightly the other way, with each move's effectiveness being listed if you've fought the creature before. The genuine story, the replacing of Gyms with something much more exciting, Lillie (whose character arc is so superior to the player character's; it was like being Link alongside Zelda for much of the latter part of the game. I hope we get to play through the next chapter of her story).

The new 'mon are an elegant sufficiency, for me, with the usual crop of ace and nasty designs (seeing Dartrix evolve into Decidueye must have been a bad moment). I felt shuttled through the story more than ever before and, as if to underline this restrictedness (is too a word), few of the areas felt really big. The biggest error for me, though, was the rocket-like pace of the fourth island. It smacked of a dev team running out of development time, as Nintendo needed a big game for Christmas. Hopefully Stars/Eclipse/Planets/Wevs can restore some balance.

It went from being a posh dandy to an adorable nerd trying to be cool.  While the final form is arguably the least good of the three, it's still my favourite starter chain and possibly still my favourite final form. Up there with Samurott anyway.

Rowlet is awesome, easily the cutest of all the starters. Dartrix is a fine and happy 'mon, still willing to push on with the bow tie and desire to be different. Decidueye is the Pokémon equivalent of The Emperor in Star Wars:



Battered by life for going its own way, Decidueye has retreated into the shadows, with its hood and cloak of wings.

The Litten line also falls at the final hurdle, for reasons I mentioned in the games' thread: I'm tired of the final evolution essentially being a bloke. I was happy to care for Litten and Torracat, but stroking the enormous left pectoral of Incineroar to keep it happy was something I never really got comfortable with, to be honest.

...were it not for the glasses.  The glasses make it adorkward to me instead.  Also its Pokédex says it's cool by nature but panics easily.  So precious.

You're not wrong about Incineroar though.  At least it wasn't Fire/Fighting... although I'm not quite sure what the justification for making a FLAMING CAT WRESTLER whose special moves are KARATE CHOPPING FOES IN THE NECK and a FLIPPING LARIAT not Fire/Fighting was.

I can see why there are people who question its legitimacy as a game, with the standard arguments tending to go down the path of it not having a 'failure state' and player choices ultimately not affecting the ends. Firewatch and other titles clearly evoke a more cinematic experience than, say, Pokemon or Doom, and player agency is certainly diminished in comparison to something traditionally found on a cartridge. To that end, at the macro level, it seems plausible not call them games or at least label them as some other genre, but at the micro things break down.

People tend to like the failure state argument of games because it sets a precedent for what games do, or force players to do, that films or books don't. Ostensibly, Firewatch, Dear Esther, Her Story, and others don't have failure states. Except that they do, theirs simply don't state 'Game Over, Man.' The challenge of Firewatch is navigation. It's not a difficult challenge, and the lack of environmental breadth and interactivity also makes it an uninteresting one, but fundamentally it is a mechanical challenge that certain people will fail. It might well be that the only people who fail are people with learning or motor disabilities, but getting lost or being unable to navigate Firewatch is something which will deny a player story progression and ultimately the credits. In this manner, it's no different than a plethora of ye olde point and click games which, rather than demanding adequate navigative skill, required you to guess what combination of items the developer wanted rubbed together to trigger the next puzzle. Oftentimes these games didn't bother with a game over screen either, but nobody stigmatises them as being anything less than a game.

When it comes to the story choices not affecting the outcome, that's a perennial bug bear amongst many with games like Firewatch as well as Telltale games. My personal preference is like Mas' in that I'm happy to go through a game once, input my choices, and accept the result as cannon. It doesn't necesserily matter if the choices don't trigger, to lesser or greater degrees, plot permutations because I view these decisions as a means to role play the character I'm commanding. To that end, I think Firewatch does a good job of letting you define who Henry is. Although your choices don't significantly influence the mechanical ending, the point of them is to try and evoke a certain feeling based on user input over the course of three or four hours. That being said, I found the overall story beyond the interaction between Henry and D, disappointing, which meant that towards the end I stopped caring a great deal. Take instead something like The Walking Dead by Telltale though and you have another game where, if you actually mapped out every choice and its effects on a board, you'd be left with largely binary options at the end with a few optional subplots, but the characters, illusionary choices, and overall plot are all compelling enough to keep me heavily invested throughout. I just don't think that matters in the end that player choices, be it dialogue or deciding on what path to travel, are largely inconsequential because that first journey, role playing, investing in characters and watching events unfold is what I'm playing these types of games for. I'm happy to buy that deception of choice and agency as long as the story is interesting and the outcomes believable - its just that Firewatch's isn't all that.

I'm a bit of a fatalist though. I don't mind if when games force a certain fate on a player. If the writers want to make a certain point then I think that's fine as long as they do a good job in conveying it. Messing with player agency, forcing certain endings and the like can be effective tools in conveying a message. It's just that games as a story telling medium is ultimately a very recent phenomena and the industry is playing catch up to mediums that have a lot more experience, so sometimes these forced endings fall flat, or piss a lot of people off like in Mass effect 3. Over time I think we'll see games that are reminiscent of films continue to evolve.

All that being said, I can see why,although I'm happy to accept Firewatch's dialogue options as a gameplay tool for role playing purposes, there is the temptation for people to just watch a Let's Play. Although it's not their choices, if the options there don't do a good enough job of establishing varying roles for the player character or at the very least, then the illusion of choice is shattered. The success of that illusion is always going to be quite subjective, but developers/writers are aware of that and the onus should be on them to make decisions within their game matter enough to people individually to force them into actively participating with them rather than watching them.