square enix – The Wandering NPCs

If you’ve ever been to Disneyland (which you no doubt have if you’re a human who has lived on Earth between 1955 and right now), then you’ve also probably become acquainted with the ‘classic’ rides featured in the parks which, despite their inherent lack of impressive features or technology, draw in abhorrently long queues of people. Based on older Disney properties like Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and Snow White, these attractions remain as popular as ever due to an attribute rarely seen in any entertainment medium: Timelessness.

And it’s this elusive quality that has me so utterly enthralled in the world of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (Yes, I know I’m late to the party). With the storied series being something of a cultural phenomenon in Japan, I was exposed to all its quirky and cute oddness on our trip earlier this year, with every other shop being packed with merchandise and props. And while I’ve had a passing familiarity with the series for a few years now, I’m ashamed to admit this is my first time actually playing one of the games. But, my dudes, I cannot express the purest joy I now feel having given it a go.

And now the weird Disneyland tangent at the beginning comes into play, as, during my first ten hours or so with Dragon Quest XI, I felt this feeling of snuggly warmth which I hadn’t really experienced in games prior to this. And then it struck me. Dragon Quest XI is an old Disneyland ride. Now, this may sound like the ramblings of a wannabe journalist grasping for an analogy, which it is, but I feel like the similarities are abundant between the two entertainment forms. Both share a distinctly vintage approach to design and storytelling, for one. They are slow and somewhat meandering, but this only serves to strengthen the fairytale-like nature of it all.

Moreover, neither the game nor the attractions concern themselves with satiating one’s lust for excitement, only the natural fondness for comfort and good vibes shared by (hopefully) most people. You’ll not find any ridiculously imposing boss fights or arduous grinding via random encounters in DQ XI. Instead, you’ll find yourself wrapped in a cosy digital blanket of ostentatiously crafted towns, open fields, and breezy combat encounters. And, like most other JRPGs, the gratification of leveling up a party member gives your brain a pleasant tingly feeling, which I hope is an intentional sensation drawn out by developer Square Enix and not some undiagnosed medical condition.

Anyways, speaking of towns, this game has a whole lot of them. And each one is as delightfully charismatic in design and in populace as the last. For example, a village which you’ll encounter fairly early in the story is called Hotto. This locale sits at the base of an inky black volcano, and its architecture is distinctly Eastern, with ornate, pagoda-like structures housing the town’s amenities.

The hot springs/ sauna facilities are a zen-inducing treat to saunter through, but it’s the inhabitants that really set this place apart from the more traditional fantasy towns you’ll have visited thus far on your journey. Speaking exclusively in haiku, the townsfolk address you in such a way that’ll have you at once impressed by the game’s remarkable localisation, and also concerned for the mental health of the Hottonians.

Just to bang on about the towns a tad more, the smaller details are bewildering. Things like bowls of food and table arrangements are both perfectly logical and visually brilliant, which appeases nitpicking arsebiscuits such as myself quite nicely. If you’d like to hear a more in-depth discussion on the topic of the game’s wonderful towns, feel free to check out Kotaku’s delightfully odd critique on the game.

Now to dispense with all the technical jibber-jabber which I find far less interesting. The turn-based combat is fairly standard for a game of this type but does give you the option to run around the battlefield in between turns, which may soothe the more fidgety player. Additionally, the pep system is intriguing in that it dispels the common issue in JRPGs of being repeatedly having your balls battered by higher-level foes. Essentially, if a party member takes consecutive hits, they’ll enter a state where they go full Blue Man Group and dish out extra damage and such. This can also allow for special attacks accompanied by flashy animations reminiscent of powering up sequences in Dragon Ball.

Speaking of party members, the game hosts a wonderful cast of endearing characters with wildly different backgrounds, designs, and combat techniques. The absolute highlight for me so far has been Veronica, the sassy, pint-sized magician who gives you more shit than a rabbit with irritable bowel syndrome. But while Veronica is a near-constant delight, not every companion with which you fight can match the same level of brilliance. I’m now referring to Erik, an ex-thief who just blindly follows you about during the game’s opening hours spouting some poor dialogue made all the worse by a dodgy voice acting performance, with his accent bouncing from English to Italian American and neither sounding quite right.

On the technical side of things, the game boasts some bright and crisp visuals powered by the Unreal Engine 4. Having tried out the recent Switch port of the game, I have to say the PS4 Pro seems to be the way to go for clearer, sharper textures and models (shocking, I know), but it’s a handsome package on every platform. The soundtrack is also strong and weirdly nostalgic considering I’ve never played a game in the series prior to this, but the bubbly, bouncing tunes just feel like slipping into a divinely cushy sonic onesie (No, not that Sonic, you degenerates). So yes, both your eyes and ears will swell with delight when this game’s grand vistas and chirpy tunes are at their best.

In summary, Dragon Quest XI is bloody lovely. It’s relaxing, enchanting and visually distinct, all without succumbing to the many pitfalls of the genre this series has helped to define over the decades. I’d recommend playing it in the evening with your +5 ‘Snug’ slippers equipped and either body-warmth buffing mug of hot chocolate or a +3 ‘Tipsy’ glass of wine equipped as your primary weapon. Eye-rolling jokes aside, I’d advise anyone who sees the appeal in the idea of a gaming bedtime story to try this series. Especially because it’s a bit of a pain in the arse trekking all the way to Disneyland just to bask in that warm, nostalgic glow before hitting the hay when, instead, you could just be popping in Dragon Quest XI.

Towards the twilight of the seventh console generation, open-world games were becoming more and more ubiquitous. Their design evolved only in increments, and their content became more and more bloated with meaningless fluff (See pretty much any Ubisoft open-world game from the past ten years). So, I was befuddled when I recently got the urge to return to an open-world game which seemingly offered very little to distinguish itself at the time of its release. And now, as unlikely as it seems, I would adore a sequel to this underappreciated gem of a title.

United Front’s Sleeping Dogs released in 2012 to strong critical praise and sold fairly well, despite Square Enix declaring it a “failure” due to their obscene expectations. The game takes place entirely within, from what I can gather, a faithful recreation of Hong Kong, and pits the player as Wei Shen, an undercover cop attempting to infiltrate the Triads and take them down from the inside.

Narratively, the game ticks all the right boxes and wears it’s Hong Kong cinema inspirations on its decorative tattoo sleeve. All the questionable motivations and double-crossing of films like Internal Affairs serve as a dangling carrot for the player to actually complete main missions and see the story through to its end. And although protagonist Wei Shen can be an abrasive twat, particularly toward his superiors in the police, Will Yun Lee injects enough charisma into the character to power through said twatiness.

Now, why did I reinstall the game’s 2014 PS4 repackage or ‘Definitive Edition‘? Well, I’ve been playing a lot of more recent open-world games like Metro Exodus and The Sinking City which, while enjoyable in their own right, try to disguise their more game-y elements at every opportunity. Immersion is the name of the game this generation it seems, and that means unintrusive UI, and making the player feel like they’re stumbling upon discoveries, rather than simply following an old-fashioned waypoint. However, Sleeping Dogs serves as a complete antithesis to this design philosophy for me, with a refreshingly old-school approach that sees the player thread through a specific set of activities and missions that demonstrate the game’s various systems.

Much like the PS2-era Grand Theft Auto games or Saints Row 2, Sleeping Dogs is chock-full of objective markers and side activities for you to complete at your own pace. Or you could simply sack that all off and run around the streets of Hong Kong in your undies drop-kicking pedestrians and eating copious amounts of dumplings. The choice is yours.

And that’s something that I feel has been lost in recent open-world ventures. Player expression in games like Horizon, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry essentially amounts to what weapons you want to use, or which tower to climb first. Sleeping Dogs, on the other hand, leaves you to explore and muck about at your own pace, while making sure you always have more substantial stuff to do when you’re ready to rumble. The result is a world that is unabashedly video game-y, embracing all the cliches that come with the territory of the genre.

However, it’s no less ‘immersive’ than its more recent contemporaries for a couple of reasons. For one, the number of side objectives and distractions littering the map is dangerous for obsessive cretins like me who need to 100% every district of the map. It’s just a shame that most of these optional tasks are fairly monotonous (Aside from the side quest that lets you date virtual Emma Stone which is my personal ultimate ambition), but that’s all the more reason why this game needs a sequel to iron out the many obvious kinks.

Although, one quality of life feature the game boasts does somewhat remedy the tedium of getting tangled up in these mediocre distractions, and that is the quick-select waypoint-selector thingy (I don’t know if this has an official name but that’ll do for now). With a quick click of the right stick, the player can cycle between waypoints directing them to proper missions, as well as highlight any side activities in the near vicinity. Weirdly enough, I can’t recall this system being used elsewhere, but it’s a brilliant bit of design and makes deciding your course of action way easier than trawling through markers on the map like a fuckin’ normie, am I right fellas?

Ah, but the nifty conveniences don’t stop there, as there are a load of vehicle stations dotted around the streets of Hong Kong, making it easy to retrieve your ride without making you stop and question the black magic involved in vehicle teleportation.

Just to dump even more praise on the game, the melee combat is leagues better than pretty much every other open-world game of its era with exception to the Batman: Arkham games. Taking a similar approach to said franchise, Sleeping Dogs’ combat revolves around bouncing around between enemies performing some crunchy combos while performing the occasional counter.

Unfortunately, though, I’m not a fan of the game’s counter system, which punishes the player a tad too harshly in my opinion. Like many games from that period, Sleeping Dogs has enemies telegraph their attacks so that you can react quickly and deal a counterblow, but if you misjudge this window of time and hit the button early, Wei is locked into an animation where he hunkers down and can be hit multiple times. This feels frustrating in that it takes control away momentarily to show you that you did a bad thing, like a dog having its nose rubbed into its own shit.

This does become less of an irritation as the game progresses though, as you’ll adapt to the timing and learn new moves that turn Wei Shen into a ferocious master of martial arts. Also assisting in the power fantasy are the environmental kills, which see Wei inflicting cruelty on his foes in some dazzlingly creative ways. Faces are shredded by AC fans, spleens are ruptured by shutters, and whole ass bodies are thrust into dumpsters. It really is great fun and absolutely the highlight of a strong melee system.

Shooting, on the other hand, is less satisfying. I’m a bit of a stickler for shooting feel, and while Sleeping Dogs‘ shooting isn’t bad by any means, it’s far from exemplary. Pistols and SMGs are wildly inaccurate even from medium ranges, and there’s a general lack of impact from most of the virtual firearms. What saves this aspect of the game from total mediocrity, however, is the implementation of parkour-like movement, allowing Wei to Max Payne his way through foes in slow-mo, diving over cover to either pop their little heads, or disarming them to fight hand-to-hand.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been playing the PS4 Definitive Edition, and this may not be true of the game’s original PS3, Xbox 360 and PC releases, but I’ve encountered a plethora of technical errors, both minor and significant, so I’ll list some of them here as a bit of a warning:

The vehicle camera is pretty horrible, particularly when reversing, which often causes you to pinball around, bumping into objects and pedestrians. This can be especially irksome since you’re often punished during missions for causing collisions and property damage.
NPCs consistently spazz out, thus causing some objectives to be difficult to complete (e.g. the game’s mind-numbingly dull tailing missions become even more tedious as the NPC drivers crash into each other, making the subject’s ‘suspicion’ meter climb).
More general stuff, like framerate dips, a couple of instances of crashing, button input delays or simply a complete lack of registration (particularly in menus) and one instance of the game actually becoming unplayable, as Wei’s phone camera (a key mechanic in both main and side content) became unusable, thus forcing both a reinstall and starting of a new save to rectify the bug.

Granted, many of these issues are unacceptable for a game with a large publisher behind it, as well as it being a current-gen update of the base game that claims to be the ‘definitive’ version. However, this may be the time to mention that the game’s development was tumultuous to put it lightly. Switching publishers, protagonists, and seeing several reworks, it’s a miracle that the game even released at all. Hence the lack of information on the game’s technical history and even which engine it uses (many forum users declare it to be Square’s own Luminous Engine, but this isn’t listed in the game’s wiki).

Despite this, Sleeping Dogs certainly can be a handsome game when it wants to be. Environmental weather effects like lashing rain and hazy mist sell the sub-tropical climate of Hong Kong. Moreover, locations like North Point (the game’s starting area) and the interior of shops and clubs are dense with smaller details. A visual highlight can be seen in the story mission Club Bam Bam, which sees Wei beating henchmen to a pulp with a large fish (No, I didn’t mistype that) in a seedy nightclub, garish fluorescent lights painting the scene like a Nicolas Winding Refn film. Although, the thought of United Front being set to work on a sequel in a more capable engine could render some jaw-dropping results.

As it stands, Sleeping Dogs’ technical shortcomings can’t overshadow the fact that every fiber of this game’s being is thoroughly entrenched in the distinct sonic and aesthetic associations carried by the cultural sprawl that is Hong Kong. And while I’ve never visited the Pearl of the Orient myself (which I intend to rectify at some point), it’s plain to see just how steeped in vibrant heritage the city is just by wandering around Sleeping Dogs’ wonderfully crafted map. Plus, the wide variety of radio stations allow me to weave through traffic, popping wheelies in my undies while blasting Tchaikovsky, which is a joy that few other games can give me.

So, while Sleeping Dogs is bolstered by robust melee combat, and an intriguing tale of corruption, where its strength lies is in its sense of place and presentation. Whereas in other open-world games like Saints Row the city in the game takes place is a mere backdrop to frame the carnage, Sleeping Dogs puts its meticulous recreation of Hong Kong front and center. Yes, current examples of the genre are more immersive and all that jazz, but Sleeping Dogs provides a simple pleasure in that just observing and engaging with its world is a gratifying experience

So, to conclude this meandering critique thing, Sleeping Dogs should not be forgotten, and a sequel would be lovely too. Even in a market utterly saturated with cookie-cutter open-world releases, United Front delivered upon their unique vision, taking a standard dish and reinvigorating it with a distinct Eastern flavour. And while I’m grateful that Square Enix helped assure this game saw the light of day, their track record gives me little hope that we’ll ever get a proper sequel. But, there is a silver lining; one that’s completely off its nut and perhaps unpalatable to some, but a silver lining all the same. Sega’s glorious Yakuza series shares just enough similarities with Sleeping Dogs for me to recommend it here.

Yes, it’s set in Japan rather than China, and its structure is less of a traditional open world and more of an open amusement park in the guise of a seedy city, but if you’ve found yourself craving a dark, twisted crime narrative set in the underbelly in one of Asia’s other famous locations, here’s your game. Or, if you liked Sleeping Dogs for no other reason than it being fun to kick lots of men in the face and sing karaoke, Yakuza more than has you covered with its blistering combat and quirky side activities. And, with Sega’s recent remasters of the first two entries in the long-running series, as well as the excellent prequel story Yakuza 0, you have no excuse not to at least dip your toes into the wacky waters of Toshihiro Nagoshi’s opus.

Tag: square enix

Dragon Quest XI – The Disneyland of JRPGs

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