Rants Archives - Page 5 of 11

My Hero Academia – A Retrospective

Tangent #1

This is going to be a write-ups of semi-tangents, as part of a larger points. Lets start with this one: My favorite sports writer is Jon Bois. In one of his videos, he makes an interesting point about the nature of critique of athletes. Here, I’ll link it.

I think it could be summarized as follows: The worst Baseball player in the MLB is one of the best Baseball players in the world. But by being in the MLB, it no longer really matters that you’re good, because now it’s only relative.

My Hero Academia ran for just over 10 years in Shonen Jump, or 520 weeks. It finished at 430 chapters. I have problems with it! I’m going to talk about them. But I at least want to first acknowledge the fucking super human feat that is telling a compelling story for 10 years on effectively a weekly basis in a magazine that effectively kicks you end when readership interest in your series gets too low.

This isn’t really a review. It’s not intended for people who haven’t read the series. If I have a thesis statement, it might be this:

My Hero Academia asked a bunch of interesting questions. It’s just a shame that it never really seemed to answer any of them.

Tangent #2

Most villains in the Pokemon games are cartoon characters. Mostly Saturday morning, occasionally Adult Swim. Fundamentally they’re goofy, unambiguously evil, and willing to harm others for their own benefit or in furtherance of their own goals.

The notable exception to this is N.

N is unique as an antagonist for a lot of reasons, but one of the primary ones is that his philosophy of Pokémon liberation and freedom is actually a defensible one. He doesn’t want to rule the world, or remake it, or add extra water. His view questions and potentially exposes issues with the Pokémon world that the games generally skate around.

In that sense then, it’s a shame that his worldview turns out to be effectively manufactured, taught to him by his foster father Ghetsis, a megalomaniac who only did so to manipulate N for his own ends, and to try to take over the world. Another cartoon villain. When N learns he’s being manipulated, he rebels, and joins forces with the player to stop this larger evil.

There is being evil, and then there is dressing in coat covered in eyeballs.

While it’s not an unsatisfying arc, it does mean that the game is never forced to really question or resolve N’s arc.

Is capturing Pokémon the same as slavery? Is the games fundamental premise a bit messed up? Isn’t kind of weird for a game with themes of friendship and teamwork to have the player only really bond with like… 6 of the hundreds you might catch?

I Promise This Is Related

My Hero Academia had effectively the same problem for me. Shigaraki, and his posse are effectively a group that’s been failed by society and are trying to destroy it as a result. Deku and chums are the beneficiaries of that (admittedly imperfect) society, trying to work to maintain it, and improve it.

It’s an interesting balance, and it provides a neat tension. Superhero’s are fundamentally status quo, and MHA took that fact and went “Yes, and” with it.

Saving the day requires that the world be worth saving. MHA does a good job of showing that, but also showing that the status quo is actually pretty broken. There’s a reason villains of MHA are societies outcasts, whether as the result of racism, mental illness, or sexual identity (though that one thread is never really examined).

Then it turns out they’re all being manipulated into doing this by the big bad evil villain who wants to take over the world.

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It’s a double bummer because not only does it remove any interesting moral tension, it does it in a way that just kind of sucks.

One of the most exciting bits of MHA is the duel growth/progression of the antagonists and protagonists. The good guys save the day, but the bad guys get a new super weapon. The good guys mostly escape, but the bad guys take a hostage. Escalating tension without having to blow up everything.

Until the biggest evil villain ever returns and he has to be dealt with by any means possible!

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I really liked how the balance of power between the two is managed. Hero’s are supported by society and have the backing, but they’re also effectively first responders. Being a good hero means being responsible for bystanders, hostages or anyone else, while villains have no social prestige or support, but don’t have to operate under societies rules. Even if both can level buildings, heroes shouldn’t! And for most of the series, they have to operate as such.

Except then of course in the finale the bad guys threaten to destroy all of Japan.

Booooooo

Conclusion

I started writing this a few weeks ago, and decided to put the finishing touches on it right now as another series I was following is also finishing up. So expect more multi-paragraph rants about manga, something I’m sure everyone loves.

I dunno. I’m not really let down by the ending in any meaningful way. I kind of checked out somewhere around chapter 300. The remaining 130 are, looking back on it, pretty mid. My Hero Academia was interesting when it was playing with the idea of a superhero society, and what that meant, something it did far less of for it’s final sets of chapters.

Anyway, I feel slightly more positive about it then I do about the fucking dumpster fire that the last few dozen chapters of Jujutsu Kaisen. So maybe a write up on that when it finishes it’s two final chapters.

Sidequest – Subversion In Games

I’ve got a review on a game called Athenian Rhapsody that I’ve been working on for a while. It will hopefully be up in a week or two. It’s quite a bit longer than most things I write, and I’ve also rewritten and restarted it several times. Athenian Rhapsody is a tricky game to talk about.

While writing that review, I spent a non-zero amount of time looking up two terms—post-modernism and subversion—and learning that they don’t quite mean what I thought.

For post-modernism, I don’t know if I get it at all, especially in the context of games. As an adult, I don’t really engage in the activity of detailed criticism and dissection of works of art outside of this blog. If you want someone to talk about industry best practices, minimal lovable products, and strategic app development, I am your man.

But I’m not a professional critic.

I do think, though, that I can talk about subversion.

In a literal sense, subversion is the attempt overthrow the government, i.e., to go out and pull a Jan 6th. In games, it usually gets used when a game does a “big twist” on some sort of mechanic, or element.

This brings me to the sort of “weird thing” about subversion in art.

First up, for something to be subvert-able, there must be something to be subverted.

For Doki-Doki Literature Club to work (for the player to experience the intended sense of wrongness) the player has to have an expectation about how visual novels should work, and what they’re allowed to do. For Spec Ops: The Line to question the morality and mechanics of the grey/brown setpiece cover shooter, there has to be a pile of jingoistic, “patriotic” games for it to subvert. Otherwise, it’s not much of a “reveal” when it turns out that the player, instead of doing a fun special moment with mortars, has actually gone and committed a war crime.

That second bit is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, mostly when it comes to indie games that want to break the fourth wall. Mostly because of Undertale. I’m sure that there were games that did this before Undertale. I know that the Mother/Earthbound series does it, at least a little bit.

But my experience of Undertale was less one of “breaking” the fourth wall, and more one of removing it: of removing the distinction between the “game” and the “real world.”

Like any magic trick, it’s not real. Undertale is just a computer program, a story. But like any good magic trick, there’s a brief moment where you believe it, even if you know logically it can’t be real.

So why am I talking about any of this?

Well, mostly because games keep trying to do this fourth wall break or meta thing, and often, they do it while following the trappings of Undertale. The problem is, when a game looks and feels like Undertale, it puts me on alert. It lets me know that the magic trick, the fourth wall break, whatever it might be, is coming.

And it just doesn’t work as well. Like a thriller where you know the twist, or a murder mystery where you know the killer—if you know what’s coming, it doesn’t carry the same weight.

So because of that, I feel like with some of these “Weird RPGS” (as I’ve mentally grouped them) I don’t quite get the same punch, or the same experience, and maybe I’m harsher on them than they deserve.

Okay, there’s also another reason

You can’t really double subvert something. Undertale worked because it was subversive, but then it sold three million copies. So if you try and mimic its whole “Murder an Entire Cutesy RPG World” thing, even if your fights are better, even if you have more characters, and better art, what you’re doing is not shocking or subversive, because Undertale already did that!

Playing Undertale changed my expectations, because it changed what I considered possible in games.

I wish more of these sorts of games were trying to surpass Undertale, instead of trying to mimic it.

Million Monster Militia – A Bunch of Unsolicited Feedback

Updated 7/7/2024 – This write up has been updated to include the dev’s response.

Pre-Script: It occurs to me after writing all of this that it will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t actually played the game I’m talking about. Whoops, and sorry. Actual reviews on a game to come later this week.

I’ll do a review of Million Monster Militia at some point, but it won’t be this week. To make a long story short, I think my time would probably be better spent trying to give some constructive feedback then bashing.

https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/2358770/header.jpg?t=1719334893

First, some context:
1. Million Monster Militia is a bag builder/slot builder heavily in the vein of Luck Be A Landlord. You draft units, units are randomly placed onto a 5×5 grid, and you try to score enough total points each round to pass a threshold. It has somewhat different framing then Luck Be A Landlord, but that is how it works.
2. I’ve played 16 hours of it. I don’t think this makes me an expert, but I do think it gives me space to have some thoughts.
3. Right now, I don’t recommend the game for a lot of reasons, many of which are fixable/are already being fixed, and a few more which might not be.

Hello developers!

Hopefully this doesn’t come across as rude. Most of the time when I write things for this blog, I aim for a tone of being a perpetually snarky dipshit. Obviously this isn’t quite the correct tone for sincere feedback.

This whole thing is grouped into three parts. The first ones are things I think you NEED to do. When possible, I’ll try to give examples, and say why I think you need to do them.

The second part will be a bunch of general thoughts and feedback, and while you could ignore any suggestions I make here, I suggest you read them at least to hear the thoughts.

The third part is just insane ramblings. I think they’re relevant, but they also could just be wrong.

Okay. Here we go.

Part 1. Please Make These Changes

Fix The Wording Of Unit Abilities
There are a lot of units in your game. Many of them do not actually do what they say they do. I know you’ve already fixed some of these, but you haven’t fixed all of them. I’m going to give one example, but I had about 10 earlier.

The Time Bomb says that it gives a multiplier of 0X to all units. That’s not true. It doesn’t give a multiplier of 0X to itself. Maybe this was missed because it has base zero damage.

Plenty of your units do things like this. I am begging you to fix them.

Dev Response:
Thanks for pointing this out. I'll put the example of the time bomb into our bug tracker. It's really easy for descriptions and abilities to get out of sync. If you have more examples of this please let us know so we can fix them!

2. Add An Options Menu
Yes, there already is an options menu. No, these are not enough options.

This is what your game looks like on my screen. There are two critical problems here. First up, there is no resolution, secondly, I cannot actually move the game window.

Maybe everything was coded so that the game can’t be rescaled. Fine. Just add an actual top bar or something so I can drag it around then.

Dev Response:
You should be able to move the game window with the arrow keys, and resize it by dragging on the corners.

3. Keywords/Codex/Readability
A bunch of folks on your Discord have already suggested this one, and even better, they suggested good keywords, so I’m not going to dig too much into this one. But yeah. Better readability on units, keywords/key text being called out, and things like the codex having filters or searches would all be nice.

Dev Response:
Agreed that these would be nice to have! It would be quite an undertaking currently as it'd require rewording all the units, and some things work almost the same, which means we'd have to probably change how some things work to line up under these keywords. I agree this would be nice an ideal world, but we'll have to weigh the benefits against the time it would take to implement.

4. Have Units That Create Additional Units Show Those Units
For any unit that creates an additional unit/item/etc, make it so that I can see what that unit is. Here’s how Luck Be A Landlord does it. You mouse over a unit, and a pop-up of information shows up above that.

I don’t need you to make it pop-up. For all I care, it can open a link to a Wiki page if it has to. But I need it to show me what the extra units it generates does.

Note: I’m aware that there’s something to be said for the wonder of discovery and experimentation, but I think at a fundamental level you’re making a bag builder, and that means I should be allowed to know what’s going into my bag.

Dev Response:
Another thing that would be very nice to have, but quite difficult to implement! We do already have this on our radar if we find the time to do it.

5. Let Me Skip The Campaign Cut-scene, Let Me Fast Forward Damage
So now we’re veering into really nitpicky, but demonstrable territory. I don’t want to have to skip past the opening cutscene each time I open the game, it’s just kinda frustrating. Also, having timed it, I think that a full round (deploy/activate/return) takes about 10 seconds, which is just about (give or take a bit) twice as much as Luck Be A Landlord. Yes, it’s minor, but it adds up, and I think it does contribute to why I feel so burnt out after a game of MMM. It would be nice if there was a way for it to go faster.

Dev Response: The cutscene playing multiple times is a bug. Fast Forward damage is a little tricky but enough people requested it, that it should be on the list...

Part 2. General Rambling

You read the first whole bit. Awesome. This next bit is just a bunch of rambling, but I’ll try to keep it concise.

1. Going to War With the Army You Have
I’ve seen other people say this as well, but I really feel like I have to force builds to win. Synergy doesn’t feel like enough to clear anything past the tutorial. Maybe I’m not very good. But also,I’ve played for more than 10 hours. Usually I have a good handle on a game after that much gameplay. I’m not sure how I stayed bad in this one specific game.

2. Some of These Units Just Feel Bad
Time Bomb and Focus Shrine I am looking at you. I get that technically there is a use case for Time Bomb where you pick it up to stall rounds out while digging for more units? I guess? But it’s rare, so I’ve never actually done that?

And Focus Shrine. Okay, I do not understand this one. In exchange for doubling the damage of SOME of my units, I take double damage? Why? Is it because I’m supposed to draft multiple copies of it? Is there something obvious I’m missing?

Honorable mention for Biologist here. It increases the damage of plants. There are a total of 2 plants, and one of them eats humans.

Which Biologist is.

3. Some of These Units Are Always Good
Hello, Med Kit, Extra-Health, and Extra Life. Each one of these units should just have the text “Take an additional turn” on them. They are always good. There is no cost to taking them other then opportunity cost of the other items that they are compared to. They fit into every single build I’ve ever done.

It just seems weird to have a subset of items that work in every single build.

4. Do I have to Play Through The Entire Campaign To Unlock Custom Mode?
This one is like… just a question. Do I? Because a custom mode to place units and test stuff would be more useful to me while trying to beat the campaign, than after I beat it.

Part 3. It is entirely possible I am wrong about everything I express in this part.

Okay, so now we’re in the third part. Again, congrats on releasing your game, and reading through everything I’ve written so far. I’m not sure the approx $7 I gave you really requires you listening to all of this, but I’m either putting it here, or in the final review of the game, so I’m putting it here for now.

I think that some of what might be hurting my experience with the game is that while you’ve used a sort of base structure from Luck Be A Landlord, you’ve pushed certain parts of the system in directions that aren’t actually more fun.

Here’s a few big ones:
1. LBAL allows the player to continue drafting and playing through a full cycle even if the engine they’ve constructed clears the current target quickly, but MMM forces the player to advance when they beat a target. In LBAL, I’m rewarded for overly successful builds with more room to maneuver and pivot into the late game, in MMM I’m punished for them.
2. LBAL has systems that open possible builds without punishing me, specifically items and essences. These give me freedom find build-arounds and perma multipliers. But every thing in MMM is a unit, which means even if a unit can open a path to victory, it can just as easily end up being dead weight if the right support doesn’t show up.

Okay, and finally:

I think the fundamental math of adjacency is a bit broken in MMM.

To be clear, I am open to being dead wrong on this. I am not good at math. But I think the fact that you’re using a 5×5 grid compared to LBAL’s 4×5 means that you’ve pushed the odds of any two items being next to each from just about 30% down to 19%, or from just under 1/3 to 1/5.

Ed Note: Okay, I know the math here is actually wrong, because at best, I solved for the comparative odds of placing a object, then placing a second object and the object being adjacent, but those odds DO serve as upper bound. So assuming math is right, MMM is less likely to have favorable adjacency for any two things then LBAL is.

There are a lot of units that care about what they’re next to in MMM, but I think the odds are much lower, and this might be part of WHY it feels much harder to create synergistic builds that run across multiple archetypes (Monster Hunter + Hydra + something else, because it’s just much less likely you hit the favorable locations).

Conclusion

Congrats on releasing your game. I’m glad that you’re working to fix some of the stuff in the Beta branch. You have a interesting mechanical base to work with here, I hope you continue to work to improve the game, and if you read this entire thing I am sorry.

Also sorry for all the comparisons to Luck Be A Landlord.

Should Paradox Engine be banned in Historic Brawl?

It seems like every few months, I see an argument about Paradox Engine in Brawl and Historic Brawl formats. Someone comes in, complains about the card, other people agree or push back, and then everything returns to normal.

Rinse, repeat.

Given how often this happens, I thought I’d take some time to lay out my view, so I stop typing it out every time this happens.

As always, my sources for this are in the spreadsheet.

What gets a card banned in Historic Brawl?

There are several things that can get a card banned from Historic Brawl by WoTC. Some are very clear and easy to understand, while others are much more subjective.

The easiest category of bans to understand are cards that shutdown wide classes commanders. Examples include Sorcerous Spyglass and Chalice of the Void.

The second more subjective category are cards that are “too powerful.” This includes Channel, Demonic Tutor, Natural Order, Tainted Pact, and Oko, Thief of Crowns.

And then we have the the rest of them. Cards that are banned for reasons specific to the card themselves. Lutri, Agent of Treachery, Field of the Dead, Ugin the Spirit Dragon, and Nexus of Fate. We’ll call this group the “Weird Ones.”

So here’s my take: if you want to argue that a card should be banned from Historic Brawl, you need to argue that the card falls into one of these categories.

Does Paradox Engine do that?

Let’s go through the categories.

Category One: Shuts off a wide class of commanders
Paradox Engine doesn’t do this. Easy!

Category Two: Too powerful
This one’s a bit harder to quantify, but we can look at the results from the cHB Season 12 tourney for some info. While this event as a whole only had 33 players, across the top 8, there were zero copies of Paradox Engine played.

Maybe you’re not convinced. Lets go back a bit further.

Season	Copies of Paradox Engine in Top 8
11	0
10	0
9	(Couldn’t find data)
8	0
7	0, but one decklist was missing

Many of these decks do play The One Ring. Some play up to seven mana rocks. As far as I can tell, none of them play Paradox Engine, and Paradox Engine isn’t banned from the event. So, no. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence the card is “Too Powerful.”

Quick Note: The data only goes back so far, and notably, doesn’t include a point in time I mentally refer to as “Rusko Hell.” I’m open to the idea that maybe Paradox Engine was a bit much then, but the current state of things doesn’t indicate Paradox Engine needs a ban.

Category Three: The Weird Ones
And this is where things gets difficult, since we can no longer look at general usage, or card abilities to easily determine if something belongs here. Instead, we have to go through cards one by one. Do any of these cards offer parallels to Paradox Engine?

Lutri: Nope! Lutri is banned as a result of companion making him into an auto-include.
Field of the Dead: Field of the Dead was banned in multiple formats, mostly for power level. In Brawl, it was an auto-include that was a strong payoff for any deck running more then 6 different lands, with very little downside. As we’ve already noted, Paradox Engine doesn’t have a high play rate, so this doesn’t count either.
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon: Ugin was a strong colorless board-wipe that could be slotted into any deck, and there was very little reason to not do so. It was also called out for being overly prevalent in main decks. Again, no overlap in function.
Agent of Treachery: Agent of Treachery could go in either category two or three. I include it three because I think it’s less a direct factor of power-level, and more an issue of breaking color-identity and being overplayed. It was effectively permanent removal that could be used recursively. But again, no clear relationship with Paradox Engine.

This leaves just a single card left to try to use to justify a Paradox Engine ban in Brawl.

Nexus of Fate: The Most Complicated Ban in Arena History

Most bans get a line or two, or maybe a few sentences. Nexus of Fate gets six paragraphs.

The short version is that it’s banned for play disruption. Arena doesn’t allow easy combos/loops. WoTC decided that 30 minutes to have a game non-interactively resolve was a bit much. So it got banned.

This is the closest we get to a comparable card for Paradox Engine: a card that was banned for causing non-interactive, slow loops.

So now things can go either way.

Like Nexus of Fate, Paradox Engine can slow down games. It requires manually tapping all your non-land mana sources in the Arena client to use it optimally and try to go infinite, and it’s non-interactive. It can often end the game outright once it comes down, if you get lucky and have the right tools. And it’s very, very boring to play against.

But it’s also not a perfect match. Paradox Engine doesn’t perform an infinite loop based off luck to anywhere near the extent that Nexus of Fate does. Once Paradox Engine comes out, it either gets removed and the combo ends, or it sits there and continually provides resources for whoever played it until they win, or run out of actions to take.

My Take

Personally, I lean against banning Paradox Engine at the moment. It’s nowhere near widespread enough to make it a “necessary” ban, and its existence is a win-con for several decks. That doesn’t mean that it should never be banned, but the mild frustration it produces is outweighed by the neat decks it allows to exist.

Still, there are strong arguments both ways and (in theory) as more and more cards, and more and more mana rocks are added to Brawl, the scales (in theory) start to tip toward a ban.

But right now?

Paradox Engine doesn’t need to be banned.

Please Don’t Introduce People to Magic with Commander

A friend who wanted to learn how to play Magic recently reached out to me. Because I’m me, I said yes, and then they mentioned that they were interested in Commander.

I said sure, because I’m stupid and don’t think about the consequences of my actions. Anyway, it’s been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had, because Commander is an awful format to try to teach this game with.

So today, I’m just going to be ranting about a few things that make Commander awful as a learning experience for Magic, and hopefully convince you to avoid my mistake.

Now, at least part of the reason I’m writing this is because Commander is such a popular format. And because when people pick up new games, they want to play with their friends, and if that means playing Commander, they want to play Commander.

I’m going to argue that it’s really not worth it.

It’s Too Dense

Many of the things that make commander the format of choice for those of us who’ve played a lot of Magic make it an absolutely miserable format for learning the game. The first one is card density.

Let’s look at a few standard decks as an example. (Some of these numbers may be a bit off with double counting cards that are both in the main deck, and side deck.)

Deck	Unique Cards	Unique Lands	Sideboard
Azorius Control	13	10	10
Esper Midrange	14	13	11
Temur Land Combo	9	8	7
Golgari Midrange	16	10	5
Boros Convoke	12	8	7

Notably, each of these decks asks the player to understand a total of at most 30-40 different cards,with many closer to 20. When we keep in mind that a lot of these are just special lands, that number comes down to 10-15 cards per deck.

Every single Commander deck asks the player to understand (likely at a minimum) 60+ cards. That’s 4-6 times the number as in a standard deck. And it gets worse, because again, this is per deck, not per player.

If a standard game has maybe 30 unique cards in it, a 3 player Commander game has over 180.

So while Commander/Brawl is great for those of us who love novelty and varied games (cEDH players, you don’t count) it’s a pretty awful experience for folks who are new.

That’s without even going into the fact that Commander is going to have a much higher mechanical density, potentially being packed with mechanics from across dozens of sets.

It obscures strategic choices and their outcomes

If you haven’t heard the phrase “Bolt The Bird”, there’s a very good little writeup that covers the idea. The short version is that it can be a good idea to remove early game mana dorks, because otherwise you get run over by the cards they pump out.

It’s one of a billion little strategies that Magic players tend to learn. But it’s not the easiest one to pick up on, especially when the time between taking an action (like bolting a bird) early in the game and eventually victory or defeat can be 90+ minutes. It’s much easier to figure out patterns like “if I bolt the bird, I win” in a series of 30 minute games than in one 90 minute game. And that’s true for any higher level strategy as well.

But because of the higher life totals, and game variability, Commander makes it much more difficult to track actions and outcomes, and that’s before even taking into account the multiplayer aspect of the game.

It costs too much

I waffled on putting this on the list, but I think it deserves to be called out, even though it’s not super relevant to me personally.

(Not because I’m rich, but because I play almost entirely digitally, and the folks I play with would let me proxy anything I want.)

I’m gonna call out a single specific card here as an example, mostly because it’s a card I enjoy. Boseiju, Who Endures is fantastic card. It slots pretty much seamlessly into any green deck, offers an incredible amount of utility in removing threats, and does it all while being a land.

It is also $30. For one card.

The Ixalan Bundle is $40. It’s 8 boosters, some basic lands, and a few special cards. It’s a much more fun product, and much more interesting for someone new to the game.

But if you wanted to play, and be competitive with your friends, Boseiju would be the better choice.

Commander is not a cheap format.

Just play kitchen table Magic

Hopefully I’ve convinced you not to introduce anyone to the game with these formats. I didn’t list every problem I’ve run into trying to teach the game. There are plenty of others! From understanding different permanent types, or how Sagas work, to the fact that all cards are spells, there are many complexities that EDH adds that don’t make it fun for new players.

So, yeah. Please don’t try to introduce people with Commander. It won’t be a good time. Now, if they’ve played years of other TCG’s, maybe it’ll work! But for someone fresh to the genre, it is going to be suffering.