Memetopia

I'm not a huge fan of casual, dumbed-down, 'everybody can enjoy this' kind of games. Some people just wanna turn their brains off for a bit and enjoy a game without having to think too much. I like to be challenged, to get into complex game mechanics and to feel immersed in a game. So Miitopia wasn't really on my radar. And it didn't have to be, because Claire is absolutely crazy about her Miis and bought the game the second it was released on the eShop.

WTF Nintendo?

I watched her play for a while and was really surprised by some of this quirky little RPG's fun and clever features. All of Claire's characters had their own personalities and mindsets and they all interacted with each other in funny, if sometimes idiotic ways. I don't like how you can really just give orders to your main character in battle or how you just watch your characters walk about when they explore, only to be occasionally interrupted by attacking monsters. Then I saw how her party was utterly destroyed by a surprisingly challenging boss and felt intrigued. The game doesn't just hand shit to you, just because it looks a bit primitive at first. So I went and gave it a go.

Spongebob is the root of all evil.

I don't play Tomodachi Life and I don't have Miis representing all my friends and family living on my 3DS. Claire does, so you can see her, her mother, some of our German friends and my grumpy self in her game, which is actually quite fun. For my game I'm using whatever random shit I can find on the internet. My goal is to destroy Spongebob.

A noble endeavor.

Spongebob has stolen people's faces and plastered them all over random monsters, so it's my job to defeat the monsters, return the faces to their owners and... look, don't ask me. It's fucking Japanese, alright?
My main character's personality is 'stubborn', which is good in some situations and frustrating in others. He's a tanky warrior and one his quirks is that he can brace for impact before an enemy attack, greatly mitigating the incoming damage. On the other hand, he may flat-out refuse healing, because heals are for pussies. It makes him likable in a weird way, but it's not always helpful when your warrior cockblocks your cleric in a difficult fight.

My first additional party member is a skeleton, who is also a chef. His personality is 'laid-back', which sounded good on paper, but it usually means that he'll hide behind the warrior or he'll skip turns altogether in order to preserve mana. He whacks monsters with a frying pan and cooks stuff to heal the party in battle.

Yeah, Zoidberg is there, too.

As I said before, you only get to give orders to your main character, while the rest of your party members do whatever they feel is right. And the AI isn't always great. Sometimes my group will get attacked by a large group of weaker monsters. This isn't a big deal if you have a thief, because they can damage all enemies on the screen with a single attack, taking out weaker groups with one attack. It gets problematic, however, when the AI decides to skip the attack to steal a banana, instead, causing the weak monsters to wreak havoc upon your party. I really wish I could just give orders to my party members directly! I have only finished the first part of the story so far, so maybe you get to tell them what to do later, once you raise your friendship level enough. But right now I have to put up with the occasional dumb AI decision.

Some boss battles aren't as 'casual' as you might expect.

If you don't want to plaster your Mii's faces all over the characters of this game, the game seems to grab random popupar faces off the internet, instead. I was a little surprised to bump into people like GabeN or Walter White, because I definitely didn't put those in there, myself.

The game automatically downloaded this one.

Naturally, you'll have more fun with this game if these Miis and faces are actually something you care about. Claire made herself a cleric with a kind personality, so she'll often spare monsters or throw herself in harm's way to protect others. She also put our friend Haggy in there and made him a cool pop-star, meaning he's too awesome to be affected by most status ailments and he can devastate whole groups of enemies with his mighty singing voice. She also put Haggy's girlfriend in there and is planning to make her a cat, which is an actual character class and all sorts of creepy.

Not sure if my thief is an ant or Tupac.

As party members heal, buff and fight alongside each other, their friendship level goes up and they unlock new special abilities. For instance, one party member might warn a friend if they're about to be attacked, giving them a chance to dodge the incoming hit. Or one of your guys may want to show off to another party member, causing him to deal a bit of extra damage. Your characters also interact with each other outside of battle. My skeleton chef wanted to impress another party member with a new outfit and came back with a flowing mane of golden, glorious hair.

Bitch, I'm fabulous!

Characters will often ask for a bit of money, telling you they'll go and buy a new weapon or some armor with it. Sometimes, however, they will return with some other random shit, so there's no guarantee they'll actually buy the thing you gave them money for. Again, this can be a fun little quirk, but may annoy you if you want total control over your party. Sometimes they just do what they want.

His face might be back, but he'll be forever alone.

Miitopia doesn't just simplify (or take away your control over) shopping for gear. Instead of stocking up on a ton of potions and healing items like you would in other classic RPGs, Miitopia hands you various salt shakers, which dispense HP, MP or bring fallen comrades back to life, depending on the shaker you use. Once they're empty, that's it and you'll have to refill them at the next inn. You can find bits of food like HP bananas or MP sweets, which can also restore your health and mana, but they're very rare and massively expensive, so I ended up adventuring entirely without them most of the time.

Hanging out with Dolan and Auntie Hamburger.

The silly humor in this game is one of its best features. Sometimes two of your party members may start a training montage together, which raises their friendship level. In fact, the whole friendship system is so cool, I wish more RPGs used it. It's just fun to see how your group goes from complete strangers to close friends, who will help each other and try to impress one another, causing them to fight harder and harder all the time. Except when one of them is having a bad day and decides to screw around with the rest of the team.

If you hate the idea that your characters may have a bit of a will of their own, then this game certainly isn't for you. But if you don't need your RPGs to be super serious and you like goofy humor, then Miitopia is abolutely worth picking up. Make no mistake, though - it may look ridiculously easy at first glance, but things can get pretty challenging, especially if you don't put a bit of thought into how you want to set up your party.

I'm 5 Months Late - For Honor

Once upon a time there was a(nother) massively hyped Ubisoft title, which looked innovative, visually impressive, fun to play and sold really well. And then it lost 95% of its user base. Now take this info with a grain of salt, as the good folks at Ubisoft state the player count is fine, which happens to be exactly the kind of thing I would say about a game I'm trying to sell. Hyperbole vs damage control, I don't know which side is lying more, but it's safe to say that For Honor isn't exactly super popular anymore.
Personally, I've ignored the game for two reasons: Dark Souls 3 and its DLC and all the complaints I've heard about For Honor - shitty netcode, lag-switchers, toxic community, macrotransactions, Pay2Win, oh joy...

15 playthroughs of Dark Souls 3 and a well-paid new job later, however, I couldn't stop wondering how awful For Honor really was. After all, I could afford it now and while some of my friends bashed the game just as much as everyone else, others said it's actually really fun, warts and all. So I took the plunge and grabbed it, jumping right into campaign mode to get the hang of things.

And it looked so damn good!

I can appreciate how they actually tried to come up with some kind of story, which explains why the fuck medieval knights, vikings and samurai are suddenly beating the shit out of each other. And I'm not gonna criticize the game, just because said story is incredibly dumb. And yeah, real vikings didn't have massive horns or wings on their helmets, real swords and shields could never withstand the amount of abuse they're being subjected to in this game, yada, yada, yada. You're not gonna play this game if you crave realism. Let's move on.

Thing is, even with a completely stupid story, the campaign is seriously fun to play, because hacking people to bits is enjoyable and the awesome cutscenes and great voice-acting are entertaining even when things make zero sense. It helps that you can choose between FemShep and Illidan Stormrage to voice your main protagonist in the knight storyline.

I was not prepared for such a fun experience.

On paper, combat is ridiculously simple, which is another reason why I had no desire to give this game a try sooner. You can swing your weapon left, right or up and you can block in these same three directions. That's not a skill-based fighting game, its rock-paper-scissors in a fancy setting. However, you also get dodge rolls, combos, parries, unblockable attacks and special abilities, so there's actually quite a lot of depth to the whole thing. Problem is, the AI can't handle most situations where you simply spam random attacks in all directions, meaning the solo campaign is laughably easy, apart from a rare few moments, where the game blatantly cheats (input reading) or where you have to fight a boss, who summons an entire pack of wolves, which take turns humping you while the boss pummels you into a mushy pink paste. It's not as unfair as it sounds and I'm currently beating the campaign on hard mode, just for the fun of it. One complete playthrough only takes about six hours, but it's good fun and you can even play it with a friend, if you actually know somebody else who still plays this.

Of course there's an obvious problem when the solo mode makes you feel like a total god of war - you'll walk into multiplayer expecting to destroy everything. And naturally, For Honor's singleplayer is about as good at preparing you for multiplayer as is the singleplayer mode in any Call of Duty game. I logged on, I got matched up with super high level players, I got destroyed and I got cussed out of my matches for being a noob. I wished I had never bought the damn game.

But... but I get all the cool executions in hard mode!

So I hated myself for a bit, hated the game, kept on playing because what the fuck else am I gonna do at 2 in the morning, followed some of my team mates around for a bit, figured out the basics and finally started killing a few people. Which is good, because the game eternally tracks your kills and deaths without mercy and if there's one thing I hate even more than being shit at a game, it's stupid stat-tracking, which rubs my nose in it whenever I look at the stupid menu screen. It took me a while, but things started looking up.

"I'm killing someone! Mom, get the camera!"

It still seemed brutally unfair how the game would match me with people in full heroic gear, with god knows how many levels under their belts, but it was good to see that they all die the same if you stab 'em hard enough. I was starting to have fun!

I gave it another try today and something weird happened. First of all, I discovered that there's a "VS AI" duel mode, which actually grants experience points and loot. So you can seriously practice against bots and progress at the same time! So I did that for a little while to get the hang of my character, then jumped into an online match and to my massive surprise, the game matched me with a whole bunch of other complete noobs! I shit ye not! Lots and lots of prestige zeros, no gear, everyone a scrub like me! But since I spent all last night fighting the most hardcore of the bunch, followed by a bunch of practice duels, I was now destroying the other lowbies in the session.

Look how heroic I am!

As for the community being toxic, I have to say it's really not any different than any competitive shooter out there. Yes, I'm happy to report that my mother seems to be really well-known in this community and by the sound of it, she's still sexually active. A lot. But really, you can disable voice and even text chat and things never got as nasty as they do in most MOBAs out there. Or Overwatch, for that matter. I can live with it.

As for the complaints about microtransactions, premium shit, the season pass, Pay2Win and all that... ehhh, it looks a lot worse than it really is. First of all, the season pass is entirely unnecessary, unless you INSTANTLY want EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER without unlocking them first. I got enough currency to unlock four characters straight away just for completing the tutorial. Add that to the three or four characters, who are already unlocked at the beginning of the game and that's half the roster right there, without forcing you to pay anything extra. Keep on playing online or offline and you'll be able to unlock the rest of them in no time. Granted, the brand new Centurion and Shinobi characters are massively expensive compared to the rest of the bunch, so if you're dying to use those, you'll have to grind or fork out. That's not great, but it's also not the big deal people make it out to be.

Of course, fiery killing animations and other such fancy stuff come much faster if you throw some cash at the screen.

I had a test run with many of the characters simply by completing the story mode, so I knew exactly which character I liked best and insta-unlocked that one via ingame currency when I started playing multiplayer. There's also a massive amount of customization options from emblems to colours to emotes, execution moves (read: finishers) and special helmets and pauldrons and shit. I love all of this stuff, though some of the more exotic dye patterns and emblems take absolutely ridiculous amounts of grinding to unlock. Real money doesn't help with that, either, since these unlockables are tied to character levels.

Speaking of real money - yes, you can buy random loot chests with ingame currency and the fastest way to obtain said currency is by spending cold, hard cash. However, you can't just fire up the game and buy your way to victory, as the really good stuff only starts to drop after your character has reached a certain level. There's also no "this sword will kill another player in one hit" or "this armor makes you unkillable" kind of gear here. Every item may raise a specific stat, possibly giving you more defense or attack power, but it does so at the cost of another stat, meaning you may require more time to regenerate stamina or your revenge mode (=more power for a few moments when you are outnumbered) could end more quickly. You can grab any fresh character with standard items and zero customization and attack a player in full heroic gear and still win if you fight better (or get lucky, that's always a factor). Bear witness to the perfection that is my fighting on the internet:

It's amazing what killstealing and matchmaking against noobs can do!

Is this game still gonna be a thing in a few months? I think so. Yes, finding a match in any of the less popular game modes is close to impossible, but that also applies to every Call of Duty on PC whenever you try to join something that isn't a team deathmatch. Duels and Domination matches are listed as 'highly active' and so far I had no difficulty getting a session going. Yes, I got disconnected once or twice or got host migration popups, which sucks. But as somebody, who has spent hundreds of hours in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, this hardly bothers me anymore. Peer2Peer matches suck, but I can tolerate them. They also mean the game could still be around in a few years, because there are no dedicated servers to shut down... I think?

If the game is as dead as some say, then maybe new seasons and additional characters will stop sooner rather than later. With that in mind, I actually found lobbies full of complete noobs today, so For Honor must still attract some new blood, right?
I've seen online stores selling this game for as little as 30 Quid now and I believe it's worth that if you're into this sort of game. I like it better than Chivalry or Mount & Blade and I've sunk quite a few hours into those. Of course, if you're already completely hooked on a similar title, then For Honor will do nothing for you. Same if you simply don't enjoy the genre. But I'm a sucker for fighting games and 'medieval' combat, so this one is right up my alley.