PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness Review

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Genre: Adventure
Developer: MAGES. Inc. , 5pb.
Publisher: NIS America, Inc.
Release Date: Apr 24, 2017

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PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness is a Visual Novel published by NIS America, Inc. (At least here in the US). If you are like me, I honestly didn't know visual novels were a thing until I got a chance to play this game. To boil it down, it is an interactive story that is more complex than a simple Choose Your Own Adventure, and is more interactive to boot. It allows more branching plot lines, hidden scenes, and things like that. This is one of the big reasons video games are great, and I'm glad I had the good fortune to expand my gaming horizon.

Now, this game is a bit of a special case for me. The PS4 version came out almost a year ago AND we did a review on it. In fact, it was written by our own Ryan Johnson, and you should go read it now. I'll even link it for you. It's okay. Go ahead and read it. This can wait.

Great, now that you have read that, I'm not going to discuss the story. Why? Well, two reasons. Ryan did a great job already going over several key points. The second is that I recently learned (due to the Persona 5 steaming policy), that story-driven games like this shouldn't have its plot spoiled and should definitely be experienced. That said, I'm going to talk about how this game functions on the PC.

This is a pretty standard dialogue screen. As you can see, there are a bunch of controls along the bottom with key bindings.

Great, now forget them. Everything in the game (aside from something I'll mention later) can be done through the mouse. Honestly, I had a much better time with this than the controls. All of the little buttons you can just click, and since this game is not based on quick timing or anything like that, you can focus on the story more. Even a right-click brings up the menu screen. Basically, they did a great job on the controls. They are super simple, which lets you focus on making the choices which almost always seems to lead to 2 bad endings then finally a good one.

There is one caveat to this, and that's the mini game included in the "extras" option in the main menu. This one you should definitely get out the arrow keys. Why? Well, take a look at the screenshot below and tell me if it reminds you of anything.

That's right, it is 2048! Like Ryan mentioned, it is used to unlock all sorts of cool extras. It is the best of both worlds: a time sink minigame AND a way to easily get unlocks.

Overall, this game is a great PC adaptation. The controls make sense. Really, pick up this game. I'm going to give this a slightly higher rating than Ryan.

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This game was reviewed on the PC, but there is also a PS4 version.

Pro's
+Easy Controls
+Clear Story
+Very well translated captions
+Great Visuals

Con's
-Sometimes the background noise overpowers the audio
-The phone conversation subtitles don't pair well with the audio being subtitled

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Thank you NIS America for providing us with this code!

DestinyQuest: Infinte Part 3 Review

Click the image to go check out the game!

DESTINYQUEST: INFINITE P3

This is the third part of a three part article series. You can see parts One and Two for my impressions of the first two acts. This iteration was a strong improvement over the previous two acts.  With that, I say that I was...

GENUINELY ENTERTAINED

This game is a choose your own adventure, first and foremost. You make a decision, you get rewarded/ punished. This is a tried and true formula that I feels the creators really managed to flesh out in this last act. They did a great job with item balance and story progression. 4.25/5. Will probably play again.

PLAYABILITY

Good job on this one. I feel they definitely have found their groove on this act. The easy missions were easy. The next tier was, to me, a difficult but approachable experience. The difficulty tier after that made me tense. However, I never felt under geared, and I always felt like the rewards were actually rewarding in a way to fit my play style. I choose the Warrior, and was given solid armor. I focused on gaining more armor. I almost always got more armor, or the same amount of armor with a decent boost in another stat. I was able to negate usually several points of damage off the damage die every time, so I could take my take and whittle down my opponents. The mechanics of the game are the same, which was already solid. Although, the longer battles can take a while. I was fighting a boss for a good 45 minutes one time. He couldn't hit me, and I was only dealing 2 damage a turn. He had 120 health. It took a while. Otherwise, the pacing is usually pretty good. Even in the longer fights, there are technically sections to give you that small "Woohoo!" moments. That boss I mentioned was actually a minion with 20 health, and a big-bad with 100 health.  You defeat the smaller minion, and you get that sense of "I've made progress".

STORY

The story for this act was the most engaged I felt of the three acts. I quickly became attached to the characters, and became genuinely concerned with the outcome. The choices I made were that much more difficult because I actually cared about NPCs, and not just choosing a few choices here and there for things I am not invested. My qualms with the first two acts were, as far as I could tell, rectified with this act. Defeat no longer means you are stuck in the story, it merely hinders your progression, and you miss on some finer details on the story. There was one missions where I had to defend a mountain top against marauding undead. Well, I was on the last wave and I was defeated. Normally, this would set me back and I would get stuck on this boss. Instead, they wrote in a defeat routine where it gracefully segued the story to the next mission with my defeat part of the story. That was legitimately entertaining. I felt that, at that point, the creators were trying to tell me a story and not just make a game.

EXECUTION

I really felt this act had the most entertainment value of the three. I would actually go so far as recommend getting this purely for act 3, then playing acts 1 and 2 as backstory. There was story there, I feel it just isn't as accessible unless you really have a good feel of what you are doing.

DestinyQuest: Infinite Part 2 Review

DestinyQuest Infinite: Part 2

This is the second part of my review of DestinyQuest Infinite. Check out Part 1 to get a grasp of what I’m talking about. I will be addressing my complaints from the first article, so context will be helpful.

Even More Moderately Entertained

Let’s say the previous game was a true 5/10. Completely average for comparison reasons. I would say this game is a solid 6.5/10. It is a good bit better than the first, but nothing ground breaking as far as game play. I will say the writers seem to be finding more of their groove with this iteration as well.

Playability

As far as this second game goes, playability seems to have remained the same. The controls are the same. Combat is the same. Even the maps function the same way. However, I feel like that they still missed some balancing issues. Miss that one opportunity to get some gear good locked in a vault? You will not be able to go back and try again. And you will need that gear to actually get past the current set of missions into the next set. In this regards, I feel like game balance is the biggest let down. It may just be my notoriously bad luck, but I couldn’t get past the second set of missions. I couldn’t. I had what I thought to be some of the best armor upgrades I could get. And I still got beat down.

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Story

I could see definite improvements here. I could tell the writer was having more fun crafting the missions. There was this one where, I don’t want to spoil to much, you can tell the story will be about vampires because of all the tropes being tossed around. And guess what? It was totally vampires! Big surprise! Seriously though, while there was a certain feeling of “this is cliché”, I still got a good amount of enjoyment from it. There were even several story elements I genuinely didn’t expect to happen.

Execution of the Goal

Overall, I would have to say that this is, sadly, a lot like in the first article. The story, from what I played, doesn’t really carry well between missions. There are a few elements that tie in (get that dwarf book and herb lore. Trust me), but mostly they are still isolated.

If you enjoyed the first game, you will really enjoy this second chapter. If you only mildly enjoyed this chapter, the first chapter can be skipped but provides the basis of why you are in the current predicament.

Score: 3.5/5

DestinyQuest: Infinite Part 1 Review

DestinyQuest Infinite : Part 1

Moderately Entertained

Now, I’m not saying the game is bad, nor am I saying the game is good. For the 7-13 hours I played, I was moderately entertained. There are three main areas that should be examined to explain my critique: Playability, or how easy to is to control the flow of the game; Story; and Execution of the Goal. Once I explain those, I think you would tend to agree with me.

Playability

As far as moderately entertaining games go, these might be some of the easiest controls for the scale of the game. Combat is simple. Click one of four buttons, most of which are disabled at any given time, and let the game handle keeping track of stats, items, enemies, etc. Fairly straight forward. However, after a certain point of being equipped incorrectly, I hit a sort of wall. With the random chance of rolling, combined with the overwhelming power of the enemies, I died. And died. And died some more. So I tried the next mission path in hopes to get stronger. And died there as well. I’ll talk more about that later though. The point I am trying to make is that they handle death fairly well. In an effort to be like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, they did what everyone did while reading those books. They bookmarked the page before the choice so when you screw up, you don’t have to read the entire book again. This makes it so it isn’t too hard to keep going when you die.

Navigating the world wasn’t that bad either. There is a simple, color-coded map that you actually get a lot of info from just by looking at it. The warmer the color means the faster you have to be in order to tackle it. Gray means it is already done. Locations are clearly labeled, and more details can be found by hovering the mouse over them.

Interacting with non-player characters is easy, but a little lacking. There are some dialog choices that you can click through to get what answers or information you can, and then you leave them alone. I mean, all games do this, but for a CYOA (choose your own story), it is a little bit of a let down. I wish it was a “talk to the bar keep OR the shadowy figure in the corner” sort of deal, where you actually have more subtle branches earlier in the game. But, I can see where that might have a chance of barring the overall story if the player completely bungles things.

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Main Map Screen

Story

Speaking of bungling things, I did just that. In reading a short synopsis of what the game is supposed to be, I thought I would be able to resolve subplots the way I wanted them to resolve. Instead, I’m pretty sure I have to either be extremely lucky all the time on rolls or be a selfish jerk the entire game to get better gear. I thought I was going to be okay when the suggested speed was 3 and I had 3 speed. I was not. And I couldn’t go back and try again. So, I hit my wall, and chose to stop. I’m not going to spend another several hours getting back to where I was. How does that tie into the story? Well, for something with the possibility for lots of branches and play-styles, it is infuriatingly linear. I guess when they say interactive story, they mean you need to play over and over again until you find the “correct answer” to the story.

Execution of the Goal

What does this mean? It means, from what I can tell on their website, the creators were trying to make a story where you can add in lots of little paths that all combine into one massive story. Well, instead of lots of little threads being wound into one cohesive string of a story, I feel like there are lots of layers peeling off of the main story, and you have to get the main one. Of course, I remember the old CYOA stories being the same way, but I feel like this could have been much better than those; a way to make one big story to follow while small choices for allow for variation.

Example of Choices

With all that in mind, I have to reiterate my earlier point. This game is still moderately entertaining. You can pick it up for 5 minutes or 5 hours and still make plenty of progress to the end. It captures the core spirit of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, while allowing for the details a computer can afford. Also, for you paying attention to the titles, there is indeed a part two! This is only referring to part one of three of the series. And, while I don’t have a complete grasp of the series, they say that you can jump right into part two and be able to keep up. So, I will brave that and write another review on their improvements to that.

Score 3 out of 5