WHAT IS IT?

A remake of the fabled immersive sim, better known today as the precursor to BioShock.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s a bit creaky and lacks some of the player-friendly features of modern game design, but it’s a fun trip down memory lane nevertheless.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Elizabeth, Booker DeWitt, Jack, etc.

SYSTEM MALFUNCTION

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an evil AI has taken over a space station, a brilliant hacker/soldier is the last hope of stopping it, and there are killer mutants on the loose.

System Shock, itself heavily inspired by rogue AI fiction such as Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” or 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a landmark game at its 1994 release. Helping to popularize the immersive sim genre, in which player choice dictates not only the outcome of the story, but the individual plot beats, character dynamics, even which level paths become available, System Shock proved immensely popular, paving the way for games such as BioShock, Deus Ex, and the recentish Prey reboot.

A new, Kickstarter-backed ground-up remake of System Shock by Nightdive Studios (sadly, the original Looking Glass Studios shuttered in 2000) offers contemporary players a chance to see what all the fuss is about – and, unfortunately, to struggle with a few too many outdated mechanics which Nightdive has resolutely refused to modernize.

System Shock is fun, yes, and a nice bit of history. But it can also be an old-fashioned slog, plagued by too much backtracking, confusing pathfinding, fiddly item management, and annoying enemies. Mercifully, adjustable difficulty alleviates some of these problems – though you’ll still spend far too much time retracing your steps when you learn you’ve overlooked something – but this is a remaster which, all things considered, would have benefitted from less fidelity to the original.

ERROR…ERROR…

The year is 2072 (which, aside, um, isn’t that far off anymore). You, the nameless hacker protagonist, have been commissioned to bypass the extremely impressive artificial intelligence protocols of SHODAN, the supercomputer in charge of Citadel Station. (Like I said, familiar plot beats.) Things predictably go awry, and soon enough SHODAN is in the midst of the galaxy’s worst computer breakdown, unleashing waves of mutated and roboticized enemies (the former crew of the Citadel, horribly transformed) as you try to figure out a way to shut her/it down and escape in one piece.

At a mechanical level, System Shock represents an awkward stage in the development of the immersive sim model. Played in the first-person, like BioShock and Deus Ex and so many after it, it nominally offers you alternatives to combat – like its many hacking sequences – but mostly relies on the cheap trick of overwhelming you with absurd numbers of overpowered enemies.

There is a lot of combat in System Shock, and there are a lot of Game Overs (unless you dial the difficulty all the way down). Save-scumming – the practice of manually saving every few minutes, to give yourself plenty of checkpoints to reload to – is practically required, since you never know when you’ll turn a corner and get run down by a dozen mega-cyborg-mutants. Older gamers will recognize this practice; it’s not particularly fun, and it turns a lot of otherwise interesting missions into a slog, since you’ll be forced to inch your way through them, scrounging for items and precious health powerups, restarting every time you’re K.O.’d.

System Shock‘s storytelling is great. The idea of a single all-powerful AI plaguing your every movement has been done many times over – Portal is a wonderfully comedic take on this – and SHODAN remains an iconic villain for good reason. She/it will taunt you at every turn, tampering with the station to interfere with you, catching you off-guard with a plethora of jump scares. Voice actor Terri Brosius, the original SHODAN, returned to re-record all her dialogue for this remake, and her commitment to this, her most famous role, really shows.

I have mixed feelings about System Shock‘s approach to progression. On the one hand, it’s great there are no big glowy arrows telling you exactly where to go, and that you’re forced to pay attention to dialogue and environmental details in order to figure out next steps. On the other hand, the complete lack of handholding can be overwhelming (it certainly was back in 1994), thanks to a maze-like design which makes it impossible to figure out what to do next. Difficulty modifiers can reduce some of this headache, as can online walkthroughs, but it takes some getting used to a game which simply disregards the decades of quality-of-life improvements we gamers now take for granted.

REBOOTING

The best “station breakdown” video game remains, at least for this writer, 2014’s Alien: Isolation, which combines the terrifying threat of the xenomorph, aka the “Ultimate Predator”, with a beautifully realized retro-future space station overrun by malfunctioning androids.

Alien: Isolation is a beast of game in many respects, not least its one-hit-kill attacks and deliberately infrequent checkpoints, but it manages to capture the System Shock vibe without cheating the player through artificial difficulty spikes, labyrinthine level design, or overwhelming numbers of enemies. (In fact, for most of the game, it’s just you and a single xenomorph in a horrifying game of cat-and-mouse.)

System Shock, released some twenty years before Alien: Isolation, had yet to learn those lessons, and its remake, faithful to a fault, keeps all the 1994 original’s bad habits intact. That’s fine, in a sense – you might as well experience it the way it was meant to be played – but it also means modern gamers might get annoyed after a certain point. SHODAN, the hilariously bonkers antagonist, still deserves your attention, and it’s worth playing through just to hear everything she/it has to say. You just might need a guide to get you there.

***
Final score: 8/10 plasmids.

Visit the official website for System Shock here.

The post System Shock (PS5) Review: Would You Kindly appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

WHAT IS IT?

A remastered, refreshed collection of the first six Final Fantasy games.

IS IT GOOD?

It is almost pixel perfect.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Frankly, the folks at Square Enix should probably send this around to their colleagues to remind them what great JRPG design looks like. (Looking at you, FFVII Remake and Kingdom Hearts III.)

OPENING THEME

Which is the best Final Fantasy?

Which is the best Japanese Role-Playing Game?

For many, myself included, the answer to the first question is also the answer to the second.

Hence my particular delight at getting my hands on Square Enix’s brand-new Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection, which bundles together the recent, respectfully modernized reissues of the first six Final Fantasy games. Though I’ve played a handful of the later, 3D entries, this is my very first time sitting down to the original NES/SNES hexalogy.

Some of these – ahem, FFVI – remain widely revered as the apex of their genres – while others – sorry, O.G. FF – are perhaps more interesting as historical artifacts. That said, across-the-board quality-of-life improvements, including refined combat, better maps, and a very welcome quick-save system, go a long way to making even the most archaic of these games enjoyable for a modern audience.

CASTLE PANDEMONIUM

For years, I was JRPG-averse. I thought all JRPGs were overwhelming, sprawling, world-ending melodramas featuring spiky haired protagonists and slow, turn-based combat. Then, I played Final Fantasy X, an overwhelming, sprawling, world-ending melodrama featuring a spiky haired protagonist and slow, turn-based combat.

And I loved it.

I cannot overstate how much I loved, and continue to love, FF X, and how much it single-handedly changed my perception of JRPGs. Without FF X, a game which proved that all the things I thought I would hate were actually the things that made the genre special, I doubt I would ever have played – and fallen in love with – the likes of Ōkami, Final Fantasy VII, EarthBound, or Studio Ghibli’s Ni No Kuni.

FFVII has since supplanted FF X as my all-time favourite JRPG, but I’ve long wondered about all the other FFs – there have been fifteen mainline games, alongside hundreds of spinoffs – which I’ve never experienced. Anyone who, like me, is curious about the classics definitely owes it to themselves to check out this Remaster collection.

THE BOUNDLESS OCEAN

As we have not, reasonably, had the time to play through all six remasters, we thought it would be helpful to provide a brief overview of what to expect – and what to prioritize.

Final Fantasy (1987, NES): The original, the game its creator called “final” because he was convinced it would be the last game he ever worked on. Well, Sakaguchi-san, here we are thirty-six years later and your career is very much alive and well. To be honest, FF holds up relatively well once you factor in all the various Remaster improvements; it’s just that there’s nothing particularly special here that wasn’t done better in later games. Still, there’s nothing wrong with starting at the very beginning. It is, in the words of Dame Julie Andrews, a very good place to start.

Final Fantasy II (1988, NES): This is the one that introduced chocobos. Beyond that, it’s a bit of a placeholder until the slightly more intriguing FF III. That said, both II and III did not receive English localizations until the early 2000s, so completionists may want to check this out.

Final Fantasy III (1990, NES): It introduced the “job system”, and it brought moogles into the FF world. But it will also live forever in the shadow of FF V, which improved on nearly all of FF III‘s elements in satisfying ways.

Final Fantasy IV (1991, SNES): The first 16-bit FF, the fourth entry is probably the one most gamers will check out first. All due respect to its 8-bit predecessors, but the initial trilogy is just a tad too outmoded, a tad too dull-looking, for all but the biggest JPRG diehards. FF IV, on the other hand, is bright and beautiful, and more importantly it’s the game that single-handedly invented the modern Final Fantasy, with its “Active Time Battle” system.

Final Fantasy V (1992, SNES): The widely used “job system” reaches its pinnacle in this second of the 16-bit entries. Though “jobs” originated in FF III and would arguably improve in later entries, there’s still something special about V‘s wildly customizable system which lets players dip in and out of classes – Thief, White Mage, etc. – at will. A JRPG that does not restrict you based on your initial character/class choices will forever be a JPRG worth admiring.

Final Fantasy VI (1994, SNES): This is the game which many consider the peak of 2D FF, if not the series as a whole. It is, therefore, the game I was most excited about finally playing, some thirty years after its original release (confusingly branded Final Fantasy III when it first reached North American shores). After FF VI, there came a little something called Final Fantasy VII, which would change video games forever; FF VI is the entry that many diehards will insist has been unjustifiably overshadowed.

AHEAD ON OUR WAY

As I’ve written before, the truly great remasters are those that resemble the game as it lives in your memory, not necessarily the game as it actually was.

And so, with the Pixel Remaster collection: updated, cleaner graphics which, if you actually dug the SNES out of the back of your closet, you’d be disappointed to discover were not quite so clean back in the day. Similarly, gameplay has been universally improved across all six games, such that the things we had patience for then (infrequent saves, random difficulty spikes, clumsy interface) aren’t barriers to enjoyment now.

Fans will also be relieved to hear that, despite a re-recorded orchestral soundtrack (lovely in its own way), it’s possible to switch over to the glorious 16-bit chiptunes of the originals. Ditto switching between different fonts to find the one that best suits you. Nearly everything you think you remember liking from the originals has either been overhauled or outright replaced, in a way that makes the games as playable as you “remember” them.

That said, some changes may prove controversial with purists, beginning with the ability to artificially inflate your XP and in-game currency, making for a more reasonable difficulty level. While this does, admittedly, undermine some of the challenge of the originals, I, for one, am immensely grateful for such changes. Coupled with the new ability to set characters to auto-battle, the remasters go a long way to overcoming the irritating “grind” that has plagued so much of the JRPG genre. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I no longer have any patience for grinding out hundreds of hours battling the same low-level enemies in order to make any progress.

Mildly controversial tweaks aside, there’s little doubt that these pixel remasters now represent the definitive versions of some of the most important video games ever made. While it’s too soon for me to say whether FF VII or FF X will be toppled from their place on my personal ranking of the best JRPGs, I’m excited to find out.

***
Final score: 9/10 chocobos.

Visit the official website for the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection here.

The post Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection (Switch) Review: You Can Actually Hear Your Pupils Dilate appeared first on Toronto Guardian.