The arrival of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3 has reignited my interest in finishing all the RPGs I’ve started and dropped this year. I’m midway through 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect 2, have a few hours left in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Triangle Strategy, and have been chugging along on a library copy of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel’s Midnight Suns, returning it when I hit the point of too many renewals, then picking it back up a few weeks later to spend some more time hanging out with Wolverine. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zeld♚a: Tears of the Kingdom hit my schedule like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and now that I’ve rolled credits, the dust is starting to clear and I've started exhuming the fossils of save files I abandoned months ago.
One of the games I've returned to is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Octopath Traveler 2, which I played for 10+ hours back in March, enjoyed a lot, then dropped for Link’s three-tiered adventure. Returning to it, I'm reminded of why I enjoyed so much of what I played back earlier this year. It's a rock solid RPG that delivers excellent turn-based combat, but it also makes some truly bizarre decisions in the details. Back in March, I wrote about how strange it was that the game allowed Ochette, the animal trainer of the party and my starting character, to cook up her monster summons when they'd outlived their usefulness. Pokemon lets you send creatures you don't have room for to the PC. Octopath Traveler 2 lets you send them to a different kind of PC — the pressure cooker! Okay, there isn't actually a pressure cooker in the game — you don't see how Ochette prepares them — but they do go from being animals to being jerky in your inventory.
But my favorite weird tౠouch in Octopath Traveler 2 is its decision to render important opponents as humongous giants while you’re fighting them. In the first fight I got into at the beginning of the game, this made sense because Ochette’s story starts with her chasing down a massive iguana. Its size in battle corresponds to its size in the world. Then I kept playing the game and got into fights with regular-sized people. I knew they were regular-sized people because the game showed them to me outside of combat first and they were regular-sized. But, then you ge🍌t into battle, and a small-time gangster has suddenly grown to BFG height.
It’s a strange touch, but one that I like. Games are often concerned with realism. Realistic graphics, realistic skin with realistic pores. Realistic puddles. Realistic light and realistic shadows. Octopath Travele🗹r 2, with its HD 2D art style, was never going to be realistic. So, it’s fun to see Square Enix lean 🔯full on into expressionism. For Hikari, his early fight against a longtime friend feels momentous, so the game represents that feeling by just… turning the friend into a giant. It captures the feeling of the moment instead of the reality.
And I support 🐓it. Realism be damned. Give me the design philosophy that give💧s me giant enemies instead.