New record for length of time since my last blog post woot :p
In the almost two months since my last post I've been doing quite a bit of gaming, working, and playing teh Magic with the gf. You know, standard nerdy shit. Also got into a car accident this past Saturday. That was really not fun. At all. Seriously. I don't recommend trying it. In order to avoid any legal shenanigans by revealing too much on the interwebs, I'll just say that my car is a total loss and so I'm now stuck trying to get a new one. It really fucking sucks. Like a lot. Like Cloud finding out his whole life for the past umpteen years was a lie sucks. But yeah, moving on... >.>
I just recently finished my first play through of Venetica, a game none of you have probably heard of. It was a, uh, hold on, let me think of a clever way to use a this game is so obscure that yatta yatta joke, nope not happening, ok, well, anyways, ahem, it was a SUPER (adjectives are obviously my strong suit) under the radar release earlier this year. It's an action rpg that plays a lot like Drakan: The Ancient's Gate, which, coincidentally, also starred a heroine. You control Scarlett, an orphan girl from the Italian mountain village of San Pasquale. Scarlett lives the typical life you'd expect of an Italian village girl. She wears virginal white dresses, helps cook the village feasts, takes care of the village children, sews clothes for herself, etc. etc. *yawn*. She has a fiance, named Benedict, who she's getting ready to happily be a baby making slave to for the rest of her pathetic er, I mean, awesome life. Everything is set to be hunky dory for Scarlett until... *dun dun dun* a mysterious group of assassins attack the village and pretty much fucking massacre everyone, including Scarlett's man, *tear tear*.
What are you doing outside bitch? Get back in the cottage and get about making my babies!
I will give props to the devs here for not making this entire sequence a cutscene where Scarlett does nothing but run around and play dumb bimbo in distress. You actually take control of her and equip yourself with a fireplace poker and proceed to kick some assassin ass. That's right, our main character goes from lame female stereotype to master slayer of assassins, equipped with nothing but a mundane household item. That's pretty bad ass.
Shit's about to get real
Anyways, Scarlett blacks out or some shit, I can't remember, and when she wakes up this guy in a costume that looks like it belongs in one of Mozart's operas is hovering near her. He reveals that he is Death and, wait for it, that he's her father (cue Darth Vader breathing noises). So yeah, he tells Scarlett that she's the only one that can wield the mythical Moon Blade (it's a sickle, cause she's the daughter of the Grim Reaper, yo) that can kill the Undead Archon. Through the course of this conversation, we're introduced to the game's morality system. You can choose to accept Death's quest in a number of ways. You can be the vengeful lover, out to kill all the motherfuckers that caused the death of Benedict (evil). You can return to somewhat stupid village girl form and choose to embark on the quest just to see your honey bunny again (good *gag*). Or you can follow the neutral path which is kind of like "*shrug* I guess I'll go on this quest, I have nothing better to do." There's plenty of other dialogue trees like this as the game progresses, and each of them shape what ending you'll get in the end (there's no neutral ending though, something I guess they didn't have time for).
Doesn't this guy make you want to burst out singing "Don Giovannnnniiiiii!", no? Just me then? >.>
And so begins the game proper. Venetica has all the aspects you'd expect of an action rpg. It has skill trees, attribute point distribution, various consumables, and loots. Not too, too many loots, but that was ok, imo. I didn't want to spend hours hunting for loot, I just wanted to enjoy the story. Combat is pretty simple. You can roll, you block, you can hack/slash. Combo attacks require pressing the attack button at the right time, that time being indicated by a shining point on the tip of whatever weapon you're using. Most fights I just rolled behind the enemy then combo'd them to death. It's also pretty much impossible to die in Venetica. Scarlett has a twilight gauge and as long as that's full, she comes back to life each time she dies. It's easily refilled by using her sickle in combat so as long as you don't play purposely stupid, you'll never have to deal with reloads due to death. Combat system enthusiasts might find Venetica's combat a bit shallow, but then again, those people shouldn't be playing Venetica anyways.
One of the four boss fights in the game, each has two phases, a human phase, and a demon phase. This is one of the latter.
Skills are split up into physical skills that deal with the various types of weapons in Venetica, and magic skills, that deal with various trees of necromancy. Yeah, that's right, our little Scarlett not only viciously wields typically non lethal items like Leon the Professional but she's also a necromancer after her little run in with daddy. I didn't use too, too much magic my first play through, I preferred building an agile rogue-like fighter, so I can't comment much on how cool all the spells are, though their descriptions lead me to believe some of them were pretty awesome (You get to summon Death, man, Death!). The skill system is pretty expansive and diverse for what is obviously a low budget game. There are quite a few builds that can be constructed, as unless you spend hours and hours of grinding, you never get enough skill points to max out everything. You could build a standard bruiser, using nothing but swords, axes, and hammers. You could build a more defensive fighter specializing in spears and debuffs. You could do what I did, and build a pseudo-Nightblade (a la Morrowind/Oblivion) with poison skills, drains, and mega awesome sickle skills. The possibilities are vast.
Just one of the two skill point distribution screens.
Gameplay consists of completing main quests to unlock new necromancy abilities necessary for progressing to the next area of Venice and a plethora of side quests, which are for leveling up, farming ducats (the game's currency), and getting loots. The main quest line plays out like a Zelda game with more rpg elements. You're constantly on the search for whatever skill you need in order to get through some obstacle in the main dungeon of the section of the city you're in. Unlike Zelda though, these don't come in the form of hookshots and the like, but instead cool little abilities perfect for the game's focus on necromancy. These include: entering the twilight world (Venetica's afterlife so to speak), which allows you to go through portals to get quest items or loots, seeing the spirits of the dead, talking to said spirits, getting those spirits to give you shit, abolishing dark magic, and even summoning the dead to scold npcs (This only happens once, more on that later).
Concept art of the twilight world, ingame looks basically the same.
All of this is pretty fun for the first good chunk of the game. The final chapter of the game though, feels rather rushed and was rather unfun. What usually should be the most epic part of the game consists of a lot of running back and forth in a palace talking to the same group of npcs in Venetica. It's rather tedious going through loading screen after loading screen after loading screen just to talk to one spirit who tells you to talk to another living dude, then going back to talk to that spirit, so on and so forth. You also only use the final necromancy ability, summoning the dead, once. I feel the developers must've run out of time or something. It would've been nice to see that ability applied in other parts of the story.
Scarlett also hates repetition.
Most reviews bash Venetica for its technical issues. I didn't really have too many technical issues during my play through. I'm wondering if perhaps the game was buggier on other platforms than it was on the PS3. Aside from constant dialogue cut outs and getting stuck in cutscenes when I first started the game, all of which were fixed by one restart, I never ran into problems until the end of the game, when a cutscene didn't trigger and I didn't get an item I needed to progress the story, forcing me to reload a save from an hour earlier. Other than that, the game ran smoothly for the most part.
I forgot the tums
Graphics are another aspect Venetica gets a lot of flak for. Honestly, I've seen worse, and Scarlett herself is pretty well designed. At least we get a decent looking main character look at for a good 30+ hours right? My only issue with the graphics have more to do with the animations during cutscenes. Some of them were pretty janky but they made me laugh so it's forgivable. Some of the voice work is quite shoddy, but a lot of it is also hilarious. There are quite a few npcs that made me lol with just how ridiculously bad their acting and dialogue were. I'm pretty sure this was intentional.
See? The game can be pretty.
Overall, I feel Venetica is a solid game, though those of you that know how forgiving I am of what the mainstream considers to be a shitty game will take my opinions on this with a grain of salt. The story is unique in this day and age of games set in space or dystopic futures with nothing but meathead men main characters and little to no female presence other than a tits and ass sidekick. There's also a subtle exploration of sexism during the game, seen through chauvinistic lines of npc dialogue, which I thought were kind of a nice touch, but kind of missed the mark I think they were intended to make. Anyways, if you want to try something new and you're forgiving of a few technical flaws and somewhat ugly games, give Venetica a shot, you might be surprised.
In the almost two months since my last post I've been doing quite a bit of gaming, working, and playing teh Magic with the gf. You know, standard nerdy shit. Also got into a car accident this past Saturday. That was really not fun. At all. Seriously. I don't recommend trying it. In order to avoid any legal shenanigans by revealing too much on the interwebs, I'll just say that my car is a total loss and so I'm now stuck trying to get a new one. It really fucking sucks. Like a lot. Like Cloud finding out his whole life for the past umpteen years was a lie sucks. But yeah, moving on... >.>
I just recently finished my first play through of Venetica, a game none of you have probably heard of. It was a, uh, hold on, let me think of a clever way to use a this game is so obscure that yatta yatta joke, nope not happening, ok, well, anyways, ahem, it was a SUPER (adjectives are obviously my strong suit) under the radar release earlier this year. It's an action rpg that plays a lot like Drakan: The Ancient's Gate, which, coincidentally, also starred a heroine. You control Scarlett, an orphan girl from the Italian mountain village of San Pasquale. Scarlett lives the typical life you'd expect of an Italian village girl. She wears virginal white dresses, helps cook the village feasts, takes care of the village children, sews clothes for herself, etc. etc. *yawn*. She has a fiance, named Benedict, who she's getting ready to happily be a baby making slave to for the rest of her pathetic er, I mean, awesome life. Everything is set to be hunky dory for Scarlett until... *dun dun dun* a mysterious group of assassins attack the village and pretty much fucking massacre everyone, including Scarlett's man, *tear tear*.
What are you doing outside bitch? Get back in the cottage and get about making my babies!
I will give props to the devs here for not making this entire sequence a cutscene where Scarlett does nothing but run around and play dumb bimbo in distress. You actually take control of her and equip yourself with a fireplace poker and proceed to kick some assassin ass. That's right, our main character goes from lame female stereotype to master slayer of assassins, equipped with nothing but a mundane household item. That's pretty bad ass.
Shit's about to get real
Anyways, Scarlett blacks out or some shit, I can't remember, and when she wakes up this guy in a costume that looks like it belongs in one of Mozart's operas is hovering near her. He reveals that he is Death and, wait for it, that he's her father (cue Darth Vader breathing noises). So yeah, he tells Scarlett that she's the only one that can wield the mythical Moon Blade (it's a sickle, cause she's the daughter of the Grim Reaper, yo) that can kill the Undead Archon. Through the course of this conversation, we're introduced to the game's morality system. You can choose to accept Death's quest in a number of ways. You can be the vengeful lover, out to kill all the motherfuckers that caused the death of Benedict (evil). You can return to somewhat stupid village girl form and choose to embark on the quest just to see your honey bunny again (good *gag*). Or you can follow the neutral path which is kind of like "*shrug* I guess I'll go on this quest, I have nothing better to do." There's plenty of other dialogue trees like this as the game progresses, and each of them shape what ending you'll get in the end (there's no neutral ending though, something I guess they didn't have time for).
Doesn't this guy make you want to burst out singing "Don Giovannnnniiiiii!", no? Just me then? >.>
And so begins the game proper. Venetica has all the aspects you'd expect of an action rpg. It has skill trees, attribute point distribution, various consumables, and loots. Not too, too many loots, but that was ok, imo. I didn't want to spend hours hunting for loot, I just wanted to enjoy the story. Combat is pretty simple. You can roll, you block, you can hack/slash. Combo attacks require pressing the attack button at the right time, that time being indicated by a shining point on the tip of whatever weapon you're using. Most fights I just rolled behind the enemy then combo'd them to death. It's also pretty much impossible to die in Venetica. Scarlett has a twilight gauge and as long as that's full, she comes back to life each time she dies. It's easily refilled by using her sickle in combat so as long as you don't play purposely stupid, you'll never have to deal with reloads due to death. Combat system enthusiasts might find Venetica's combat a bit shallow, but then again, those people shouldn't be playing Venetica anyways.
One of the four boss fights in the game, each has two phases, a human phase, and a demon phase. This is one of the latter.
Skills are split up into physical skills that deal with the various types of weapons in Venetica, and magic skills, that deal with various trees of necromancy. Yeah, that's right, our little Scarlett not only viciously wields typically non lethal items like Leon the Professional but she's also a necromancer after her little run in with daddy. I didn't use too, too much magic my first play through, I preferred building an agile rogue-like fighter, so I can't comment much on how cool all the spells are, though their descriptions lead me to believe some of them were pretty awesome (You get to summon Death, man, Death!). The skill system is pretty expansive and diverse for what is obviously a low budget game. There are quite a few builds that can be constructed, as unless you spend hours and hours of grinding, you never get enough skill points to max out everything. You could build a standard bruiser, using nothing but swords, axes, and hammers. You could build a more defensive fighter specializing in spears and debuffs. You could do what I did, and build a pseudo-Nightblade (a la Morrowind/Oblivion) with poison skills, drains, and mega awesome sickle skills. The possibilities are vast.
Just one of the two skill point distribution screens.
Gameplay consists of completing main quests to unlock new necromancy abilities necessary for progressing to the next area of Venice and a plethora of side quests, which are for leveling up, farming ducats (the game's currency), and getting loots. The main quest line plays out like a Zelda game with more rpg elements. You're constantly on the search for whatever skill you need in order to get through some obstacle in the main dungeon of the section of the city you're in. Unlike Zelda though, these don't come in the form of hookshots and the like, but instead cool little abilities perfect for the game's focus on necromancy. These include: entering the twilight world (Venetica's afterlife so to speak), which allows you to go through portals to get quest items or loots, seeing the spirits of the dead, talking to said spirits, getting those spirits to give you shit, abolishing dark magic, and even summoning the dead to scold npcs (This only happens once, more on that later).
Concept art of the twilight world, ingame looks basically the same.
All of this is pretty fun for the first good chunk of the game. The final chapter of the game though, feels rather rushed and was rather unfun. What usually should be the most epic part of the game consists of a lot of running back and forth in a palace talking to the same group of npcs in Venetica. It's rather tedious going through loading screen after loading screen after loading screen just to talk to one spirit who tells you to talk to another living dude, then going back to talk to that spirit, so on and so forth. You also only use the final necromancy ability, summoning the dead, once. I feel the developers must've run out of time or something. It would've been nice to see that ability applied in other parts of the story.
Scarlett also hates repetition.
Most reviews bash Venetica for its technical issues. I didn't really have too many technical issues during my play through. I'm wondering if perhaps the game was buggier on other platforms than it was on the PS3. Aside from constant dialogue cut outs and getting stuck in cutscenes when I first started the game, all of which were fixed by one restart, I never ran into problems until the end of the game, when a cutscene didn't trigger and I didn't get an item I needed to progress the story, forcing me to reload a save from an hour earlier. Other than that, the game ran smoothly for the most part.
I forgot the tums
Graphics are another aspect Venetica gets a lot of flak for. Honestly, I've seen worse, and Scarlett herself is pretty well designed. At least we get a decent looking main character look at for a good 30+ hours right? My only issue with the graphics have more to do with the animations during cutscenes. Some of them were pretty janky but they made me laugh so it's forgivable. Some of the voice work is quite shoddy, but a lot of it is also hilarious. There are quite a few npcs that made me lol with just how ridiculously bad their acting and dialogue were. I'm pretty sure this was intentional.
See? The game can be pretty.
Overall, I feel Venetica is a solid game, though those of you that know how forgiving I am of what the mainstream considers to be a shitty game will take my opinions on this with a grain of salt. The story is unique in this day and age of games set in space or dystopic futures with nothing but meathead men main characters and little to no female presence other than a tits and ass sidekick. There's also a subtle exploration of sexism during the game, seen through chauvinistic lines of npc dialogue, which I thought were kind of a nice touch, but kind of missed the mark I think they were intended to make. Anyways, if you want to try something new and you're forgiving of a few technical flaws and somewhat ugly games, give Venetica a shot, you might be surprised.
saiylor:
Amazing! Mine did too about three years ago. Gone but not forgotten!