Week 6: Hyrule Warriors & Darkest Dungeon - with guest blurb by Richard Dansky

When I've gotten a chance to play anything this week, it's either been Darkest Dungeon, which I Kickstarted last year, or Hyrule Warriors with the wife. Let's talk about Darkest Dungeon for a bit. I'm just going to steal their blurb from their Steam page:

Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, famine, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Can you keep your heroes together when all hope is lost?

Essentially, your father wasn't happy enough living a life of luxury in a swanky cliff-side estate and decided to dig into the earth, finding a gateway to a realm of evil. Good job, dad! Now it's up to you to recruit adventurers and send them off to their eventual death in an attempt to reclaim the place. The game works on building a large group to select from, and continually cycling them in and out of groups of four, shoveling them off into dungeons to try to get heirlooms and increase their levels. While they're on their adventures, which you control, they'll gain stress, which can give them attributes that change their character. There is a lot to juggle in the game, and it can seem like too much at times. It's also intended to be very difficult, and excels at this. If you want to rush through something, it definitely is not the game for you. They want it to be slow paced overall. They could have some better explanations in some of the menus, but it's Early Access still, so we'll see what they do over time besides add content to it. So far, it's an extremely fun game if you're looking for a Rogue-like that doesn't play with kid gloves.

Now, Hyrule Warriors is a game I'm really enjoying, too. Yes, it's a Musou game. For those that don't know, Musou games are the "genre" that games like Dynasty and Samurai Warriors belong to. Most of them are made by Koei, as it's something they kind of specialize in. You play as a single character and fight against hordes of enemies. In Dynasty and Samurai Warriors, they try to tie into some historical reference material, but that isn't why you play, because they just get ridiculous in that regard. I asked Richard Dansky, Lead Clancy Writer for Ubisoft, friend and former co-worker, to write a few thoughts as to what makes Musou games great. He's responsible for me getting into them, as I didn't really play them much until I kept hearing him talk about them.

"The wonderful thing about Musou games is that they have a very simple goal: Make you feel like an incredible badass. And so when done well, they bend all their systems towards reinforcing that feeling of ultimate mastery. Flying bodies, camera pans, SFX, kill counters spinning like crazy - all of that is there to tell you that you are indeed awesome." - Richard Dansky

And they do a great job of this in Hyrule Warriors, which is a Musou set in The Legend of Zelda universe. Numerous characters to choose from, huge over-the-top attacks, and easy to pick up gameplay make it great to play after a day of work. I don't have to think too hard to make awesome stuff happen. I'll probably finish the main story this week, but will likely continue to play after finishing the story as there is a lot of extra stuff to unlock. Of course, hopefully on Friday I'll be playing Monster Hunter 4. It all depends on when Gamestop ships my New 3DS.


Currently Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Darkest Dungeon
Games Completed: 2
Games Purchased: 1
Net Total: +1