I am determined to always be an individual. No marching, no chanting.

No marching, no chanting.

No marching, no chanting.

No mar- Left, Riiight-Left!

Bah, NerdLord: Blunt Maid Fork Mule

Oooohh, it's Tab not Esc.

Never mind.

 

Time to find a good way to skill up before venturing out. This should mean arena fights, where injuries are hand-waved with the excuse of using blunted practice weapons which don't cause lasting harm.

However, since 1) even after a day's rest I'm starting out at 20% health and 2) there's a tournament in Danustica, I'll just have to see how I fare outside the gates. I did try one round in the tournament and did better than I'd hoped, which is to say I landed one hit before hitting land.

My starting cash buys a sack of grain, light crossbow and quarrels and three fresh-faced young lads in search of adventure. Interestingly troop recruitment seems based on relation with each town's wealthy citizens now, which might reward networking in a particular area in the long run. Accepted Surena the Gutting-Knife's quest (she's nicer than she sounds) to rescue her goons from goon-hunters though if camps are anything like I remember I won't be able to do it for quite a while.

 

M&B1 had a problem with towns. As its world grew (especially in Warband) and locations proliferated, the focus shifted to the overland map, and customers rightly demanded menu shortcuts to important NPCs like the tavern / castle in each town. Unfortunately, as M&B's environments are almost entirely decorative (unlike say, The Elder Scrolls' "everything's lootable" mentality) those NPCs were the only things which might reward a visit in the first place, and after a while the only objective warranting a physical trot around town was the quest-giving guildmaster. After you grew rich enough not to care, not even that. I assume it's to prevent this that Bannerlord ties trade price rumors to chatting up townsfolk, and I must admit towns do look slightly livelier than they used to with their musicians and dancers an varied decor like gardens and animal paddocks... but they're a bit of a let-down for a sequel a decade in the making. Open-air workshops might be nice if workers did more than mill about. Talking to every townie you meet might be good if you didn't have to cycle through hi/bye dialogue options (floating overhead text would serve just as well for mere trade price rumors) and zooming into their faces reveals Bannerlord's otherwise fairly comprehensive face customization isn't being put to much use.

Most Calradians sport the same droopy-eyed, purse-lipped, buck-toothed, moon-faced character model, simply with a couple different hairstyles, aging and small variations in clothing. On the other hand: those ain't hobbits above. They're children. Most games don't bother with 3D models for children, since it would be development time wasted on characters superfluous by definition, but Bannerlord's effort to implement aging gives it an easy leg-up in portraying realistic communities. Still, sometimes, the deliberate slight exagerrations built into the models (combined with algorithmically selected animations) can appear... let's say striking:

 

Gives me flashbacks to TES4:Oblivion.

Anyhoo, I'm a bit disappointed to see food no longer decays, which added a bit of urgency to old Warband trips, but this may be due to a world map which at first glance looks both larger and more fragmented than M&B1 Calradia. Most notably an ersatz Mediterranean Sea makes its appearance, splitting off mameluke lands from the rest of the subcontinent. Danustica, my starter town, appears positioned vaguely Constantinople-ish, though TaleWorlds made the right choice in maintaining only thematic and not historical or geographic references. They certainly could not have competed with Europa Universalis or Kingdom Come: Deliverance in verisimilitude and are better off playing to the weird triple hybrid genre niche to which M&B is already a main reference point.

But I shouldn't get ahead of myself. I was lucky the Southern Empire massed its armies near Danustica at the start of the game, making it easy for me to lure three looter bands in a row into traps against local lords' much larger armies. I leveled up in the first battle after only two crossbow shots (seems a bit rushed) and my share of the loot is... a decaying ho. Wait, I thought there were no zombies in this game? After trading that in for a couple more recruits at the nearest village, I was finally ready to fly solo. So to speak.

Forked 'em up!

A 5v5 engagement against the nefarious looters of Tegresos yields something rusty, nothing new, something tattered, butter too! After cashing in and upgrading a few archers, fights against unarmored, unshielded looters get very easy very fast. I take another couple of quests only to discover smuggling goods for one merchant now pisses off the others in town... this has potential. Had to turn two of them down though for trying to send me eastward. Anyone who played the first M&B knows not to venture anywhere near the steppes with a starter party.

I was surprised at how well looters' trash sells, and Calradian economy in general seems to have suffered some retroactive inflation in this prequel, but it's offset at least in part by a greater need for mounts. Where in the original you only needed a handful for yourself and your companions, they're now required both to increase cargo space and for mounted unit upgrades (got my first Imperial Equite, may enemies shudder at the sound of his hoofbeats) and I find myself needing more and more of them. Their cargo capacity seems minimal and all the trash loot from these trash looters is slowing me down - probably another reason why food no longer decays.

Having made a couple thousand in profit schleppin' silver from a village mine to the big cities (and cheated by crashing the game when I was ambushed while slowed to a crawl by its weight) now it's time to start trawling taverns for companions. First up: Ira the Wronged, a classy gal impoverished by riots. But, while I'd planned to finish off this chapter by selecting my trusty sidekicks, I only now noticed their recruitment is limited by this newfangled "clan" mechanic, so next time will be all about grinding street cred.

For now, with an eye toward building up my trade skill in the near future, my search for the stalwart heroes of the land was pre-empted by a search for... mules! Wonderful, sensible, high-capacity mules!

 

Why yes, I do have a snazzy new chapeau. Thank you for noticing.

 Ah, humble beginnings, how I do love them.

Bah, NerdLord: My Asspicious Beginning

Mount&Blade occupied quite a bit of my time in the years immediately preceding this blog's start, qualifying alongside the likes of Civilization 4 as one of those games I had to uninstall to stop myself from playing. Several years ago I bid it a final farewell, anticipating the sequel's impending release... which impended for quite a while as it turns out. When M&B2: Bannerlord finally came out I decided based on rumors to allow it a year or two of patches, this being one I really want to enjoy.

And now.

It is time.

Time for my triumphant return to the vales and ramparts of Calradia.

Time to build a character, build an army, build a kingdom, build a glorious campaign upon my unmatched FPS/RPG/Strategic savoir-faire.

 

The original M&B was late middle ages European flavored, with this prequel rehashing Roman dissolution, and the faction system seems expanded. I used to spend most of my time as Vaegir / Rhodok but this time I surprised myself by not picking a borderland origin. Imperial I am then, scion of fallen glory, glory of fallen scions, scientist of gory fellings. Jolly good, pip-pip... wait, wrong empire... jam est sous avions... nope, still a bit off... all o' who ache bore? getting colder... umm, 'ave a quasar! Key vis-a-vis roam-anus sumo. That's the one! Cool. A'ight, I got this.

Sandboxin' on bannerlord difficulty - ironman mode (not that I won't cheat by Alt-F4 if I feel like it.) Let's see, I was born to urban artisans, noted for my aptitude with numbers, gathered herbs in the wild, stood guard with the garrisons, saved my village from a flood and am starting my campaign at the moderate age of 30. I hear they're running some kind of permadeath / lineage system now so I want to leave myself plenty of time for good ol' patrician porkin'.

The skill system certainly looks improved, though I have to wonder at hard- and soft-caps. Think I managed to approximate my usual support caster role, though the engineering skill probably won't bear fruit for many a year. First order of business is to head into town to trade this starter twig and arrows in for a proppah x-bo.

 

While I'm here, I bethought myself of ascertaining the new decor's interaction potential (very low in the original) and sought a better vantage point for an opening screenshot. Like the now scalable gate towers.

Let's see, can I hop between these crenelations to the gatehouse roof?

Oh... am I now stuck because I can no longer jump back up?

Is the only way down... y'know, straight down?

Will I take falling damage if I drop here in town?

The answer to all these questions, as it turns out, was <YES>

Well then.

From the bottom of my last health point, I swear, I'm really a medieval military genius!

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P.S. I did remember I could've probably ESC-ed out of my predicament... after I'd taken the plunge.

ST: TNG - Identity Ethics

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 1.03

The Naked Now

The crew gets infected with an ethanol-nine variant from a derelict, alcoholizing their blood, and start drunkenly laughing and hitting on each other. The series could very well have accomodated such a non-plot late into its run when a change of pace was warranted. Instead, in a truly insane move, it played as the second episode. We didn't need to see the crew drunk before we'd even seen them sober!

So in this spirit let's look at one of TNG's worst recurring problems, a vague idea that toying with characters' defining characteristics once in a while can keep a serial fresh, expressed in weirdly awkward ways.

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Seriesdate: 2.05

Loud as a Whisper

Remember that deaf guy using three other people as his lifelong sock puppets... and somehow getting nothing but sympathy and admiration for it? Upon boarding the Enterprise he launches into a "differences make us special" after-school duet with Geordi on how much they love being unable to see or hear without proxies and they wouldn't give up their disabilities even if they had a chance. The message that you wouldn't be you without your disability, that you would lose your identity by healing a physical ailment, strikes a sour note amid TNG's otherwise positive mindset and was never again stated quite as bluntly or naively.

Also, isn't blindness worse than deafness? So shouldn't Geordi have gotten, like, five mooks to follow him around and describe elephants to him? Because he's more oppressed therefore better than everyone else? That's how it works, right?

Aside from toying with the idea of curing LaForge's blindness, our hero of the week goes to pieces when he loses his chorus, but is talked back into the game by Deanna for an uplifting ending.

So... maybe you should've given him one pep talk instead of three slaves to begin with?

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Seriesdate: 4.10

The Loss

Discussed more at length here for the nice SciFi reveal of a vertically-undetectable shoal of Flatland anchovies. Their little psi-voices jam Troi's psi-dar, and "the loss" of her superpower turns her into a quivering overemotional wreck, quitting her job and crying alone in her room. We conveniently forget that aside from a half-betazoid, Troi's supposed to also be exceptionally trained in psychology, psychotherapy and is a Starfleet Officer to boot, with all the psych evaluations that implies she must've passed. It made absolutely no sense for the woman who can keep a thousand-strong submarine crew sane through months wandering the fringes of space to just instantly go to pieces and relinquish her very place in society because she's suffered the betazoid equivalent of maybe-temporary, maybe-permanent deafness.

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Seriesdate: 4.18

Identity Crisis

 

LeVar Burton joins the Blue Man Group!

Solid from a directing / effects / acting standpoint, especially the pivotal scene of LaForge holodecking the scene of the crime, even if you can see the extras twitching when they're supposed to be paused holograms. However, the script is purely a creature feature and manages to plow into almost every single idiotic horror flick cliché short of a topless bimbo tripping and falling while running from the monster.

    1) You're chasing a shuttlecraft piloted by a mentally unstable victim of some unknown alien infection, about to burn itself up on entering a planet's atmosphere. Do you get his two friends, standing right there on the Enterprise's bridge, to gently talk him down and undercut his misfiring cortex via primitive but effective emotional appeals? No. You obviously have a captain he's never met, from the Starfleet he's already fleeing, try to order and domineer him into returning. "He's panicking" - yeah, no shit! In other news, if your dog slips his leash, the best way to entice him back is to call a random burly, angry mailman to scream loudly and throw rocks at him.

    2) You discover a repeating pattern: of the five members of the old away-team, three have independently found their way to this planet via shuttlecraft. So the logical thing to do is to... send another away-team physically down to the epicenter of their obsession. Before even running any kind of comprehensive scan from orbit. Including the two remaining, probably already infected, original survivors. No hazmat suits? No problem!

    3) Do you organize a grid pattern search maintaining visual, or at least audio contact the entire time? No. Just scatter and amble aimlessly about hoping to stumble across clues.

    4) When your mighty alien warrior of a warrior race says he feels like he's being watched, by all means shrug it off.

    5) Then when, inevitably, one of the two survivors vanishes, the obvious right choice is to "fan out; let's find her" - they're picking us off one by one, we've gotta split up!

    6) Upon confirming she's panicking just like her predecessor who blew himself up in a shuttle and her "blood chemistry is way off" due to a histamine response do you quarantine her in a padded cell? Naaahh. Just tell 'er to stay put and pat the probable mind controlled plague rat reassuringly on the shoulder... DOCTOR Crusher. And give her free run of the ship, despite acting increasingly erratic. And stop to give her a hug when her symptoms worsen in a well-circulated corridor because by this point why the hell not?

    7) Twenty minutes into this nonsense Geordi realizes the infectious agent could even be "in the air itself" (in a closed system to boot) but... I can't even...

 

It's just a rash.

    8) OK, we've finally established the disease isn't airborne after certainly infecting a thousand people if it had been. It biologically rewrites one species into another. On one hand, nobody tests Riker and Worf, who were down on the planet and might've been exposed anyway. On the other hand, nobody thinks to send down Data, their one abiotic, adiabatic, adiabetic crew member, for further sampling.

    9) Crusher finally decides to do a more thorough scan of her patient. Better late than - who gave this idiot a medical license?

   10) Geordi continues working, which would make sense if any of the military officers waiting for him to turn into an alien infiltrator would think to assign one of their dozens of layabout security mooks to shadow him. Hell, make it two mooks, keep the change.

   11) See point 1) They chase the transformed Geordi down to the planet... empty-handed. No net, no bolas, no... harpoon? No anything, not even a salt lick to lure him. Their best plan to get their mind-controlled crewmate back is "take my hand" - after four other identical cases where that explicitly DID NOT WORK!

And yes, of course it works on Geordi. He's a blue-shirt.

To get a sense of this plot's nonsense ratio, consider the notion of a species of invisible, proto-humanoid, parasite-egglaying apes evolving some kind of interstellar homing instinct still makes more sense than the rest of it.

And yet... damnit, I kinda like it. Maybe I'm just a sucker for creature features.

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Seriesdate: 4.19

The Nth Degree

 

In which the Enterprise gets a Broccoli patch.

 

We begin with yet another tediously overextended holodeck scene, putting Broccoli through his public humiliation paces as an incompetent actor, lightened up by Beverly Crusher coyly sashaying over to their resident big strong klingon to coo "ah, Worf? I have an opening" - until she adds "in my [acting] workshop" a second later, I thought I'd queued up some porn parody version. This is all to remind us of Lt. Barclay's status as designated loser and acceptable punching bag due to his anxiety and general introverted nerdiness, after his first appearance revolved around ridiculing and condemning him for privately fantasizing about duelling and/or dicking his coworkers.

But don't worry. All that is about to change... for about thirty minutes, before the status quo is reaffirmed.

LaForge and Barclay get flashed by an alien lozenge, after which Barclay, lacking a visor to shield him from the whims of screenwriters, begins acting out of character. He out-engineers LaForge, gives a passionate performance in Crusher's acting workshop, schools a holographic Einstein, hits on Troi, is scientifically confirmed to have become the smartest human ev-vurr, and when the ship is in danger of explodey from the telescope array it was repairing, instructs the holodeck in synthesizing a mind-machine interface so he can directly compute an instant solution... and ends up taking over the entire ship. Pause for a second to wonder why exactly the Enterprise's central computer features back-door access via the holodeck of all things. Next time someone s(t)imulates a visit to Eroticon 6, you could literally wind up fucking the ship's brains out!

Anyway, Barclay launches into standard mad scientist rants about solving all problems, wormholes the Enterprise to the galactic center to meet the race of floating heads whose probe reprogrammed him, gets zapped back to his mediocre self but remains good at chess now. The End.

If you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan.

For one thing, Barclay's problem was never intelligence, so his Algernon-ish skyrocketing IQ lacks the requisite contrast. For another, given he was socially isolated by being an introverted tech-head, becoming even more of a tech-head is by no means consistent with his newfound confidence and initiative. Of course it does make sense as alien reprogramming, but then you're faced with the other officers' failure to respond to one of their own being mind-virused, a situation they routinely faced five times a season. You'd think they'd have a standard operating procedure in place by now. At least rescind the Manchurian Candidate's computer access! Never mind another example of our nominal exploration vessel stumbling across game-changing discoveries like the cyborg interface or cross-galactic teleportation yet making not the slightest effort to secure them.

 

And never never mind the fact any species "exploring" by making random aliens or their computers super-intelligent and teleporting their ships straight to its home planet would've been wiped out aeons ago.

Instead of keeping the plot consistent, all effort sank into hammering home the TV-friendly message that being smart is wrong and everyone is right to hate you because out-thinking them is evil. The real end.

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Seriesdate: 5.16

Ethics

Bev rips out Worf's spine and shows it to him!

 

Our resident mighty klingon warrior gets crippled by blunt trauma, depriving him of either might or war and turning him suicidal as per klingon custom for un-klingy klingons, prompting one of the most gratuitous bits of nonsense in the show's run: klingons have spare, unused "redundancies" in all of their vital organs. Aside from being an absolutely laughable idea in evolutionary terms* note the main plot works fine without this little SPECIES-REDEFINING tidbit thrown in just so Worf could flatline on the operating table for extra bonus redun-dundant drama.

 

As a rehash of the previous season's musings on ritual suicide in Half a Life, Worf's story's just swamped in triteness.

It does allow Worf to start outgrowing his naive, fanatical, uncritical, humorless devotion to klingon tradition as part of his character arc, but without displaying Timicin the kaelonite's greater awareness of such traditions' scope and waning propriety.

Riker emotionally blackmails Worf into giving up a tradition without further analysis while Timicin resisted a similar attempt from Lwaxana based on analyzing the social cost or necessity of fometing revolt.

Where Worf's kid just serves as an emotionally manipulative tool to prod him toward a predetermined outcome, Timicin's adult daughter actually supports his suicide... not because she hates her dad but because she wants him to live a full life, including its supposedly good and proper ending.

 

Even the B-plot, with Crusher browbeating the visiting doctor over putting research above individual patients' safety, doesn't scan. Worf's fully informed willingness to risk death in an objectively better alternative than hara kiri gets dismissed out of hand in an attack on the researcher's irrelevant motivation. The more relevant, wider question of whether she should be permitted to continue practicing is also never brought up, because 24th century medicine apparently lacks any formal ethics oversight beyond Bev Crusher wagging her finger. Either Crusher had a point in which case formal action should have been taken or she didn't and should've calmly informed Worf of her professional opinion then STFU and carried out her patient's wishes. Either version had merit, but instead we get thirty minutes of wishy-washy emotional appeals against reason.

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Seriesdate: 7.17

Masks - (relax, it's got nothing to do with COVID)

I could pick more illustrative illustrations, as from a purely visual standpoint it's one of the series' more striking episodes, but honestly, Spiner deserves the limelight for a performance to rival Stewart. Also, the sheer creepiness of that chair-swivel reveal will stick with ya for effectively playing down minor changes like eye color, an extra layer of powder and the sun symbol plus Spiner's manic rictus to carry the uncanny valley effect.

 

Masaka is waking!

 

Data's brain gets pirated once again, this time by a space-library from 87m.y.a. containing an entire alien culture, and cycles through various of their personalities, most importantly that of a cruel sun-goddess leader of their pantheon. To add a bit more tension, the library somehow also starts matter-replicating the Enterprise into a vaguely mesoamerican temple complex, forcing them to prevent themselves floating through space on stone altars.

On one hand the symbolism here seems ahead of its contemporary pop culture. Back in '94, seven years before Gaiman's American Gods in the now prehistoric ages before everyone had permanent internet access, comparative mythology was not something you could casually wikipedia god-by-dog on a whim, and not nearly a hot enough topic for most people to buy specialty books. Thus the script walks you through a tediously overextended riddle about a horn-like symbol that's obviously a moon god chasing the sun away, plus other allusions any GenZ-er could independently thumb through faster than the Enterprise's crew dialogues them. Still, for the purpose of this discussion, Data's temporary multiple personalities are less important than the denouement of Picard conning the sun into acting out her ritualistic nightfall, rewriting her role, a surprisingly astute (for '90s television) example of temple rituals re-enacting divine order.

Otherwise though the script's easy to criticize. Very easy. So let's do that.

Start with the plot contrivance of Picard discovering his ship is being metamorphosed into clay statuettes early on yet deliberately allowing the process to continue until it's too late, something no captain would ever do and any viewer could resolve in a dozen saner (albeit less dramatic) ways while still studying the alien macguffin.

The half-assed technobabble explanation for changing sets is... meh, par for the course. Until, that is, you ask yourself why the library never bothered assimilating the far greater mass aggregated around it over the past 87mil. By the ending when Masaka falls asleep and everything automagically rubberbands back to status quo you can't escape the realization you just watched an Original Series script.

By its last season the show was either reaching for increasingly nonsensical ideas or blatantly recycling old ones. Where Ethics rehashed Half a Life, Masks tries the same for the memorable Inner Light... and fails even more soundly. Picard congratulating Data on having "been an entire civilization" inadvertently underscores the problem.

For one, Picard in Inner Light was immersed (as Kamin) as a rational participant in a first-person account of a society with its manifold flaws and charms. Data instead plays what appear to be deified ancestor figures in what he himself describes as a dreamlike state.

Also, Picard/Kamin's largely mundane experience drove home his civilization's ingenuousness, their desperate need to reach out to other minds in their last hour, securing the entire experience's poignancy. Masaka's pomp, grandiose matter-reshaping powers, the 87m.y. timespan as opposed to one thousand and the supposedly thousand individuals Data momentarily housed (but can't remember) come across as overblown amateur fanfiction of a better concept.

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Seriesdate: 7.23

Emergence

(working title: "something-something New Age buzzwords something-something")

 

In which the Enterprise has kittens.

Ugh... this is one of the series' last episodes, and much like Bev fucking a space ghost or Wesley's peyote-fueled ascension to heaven (while talking to many animals) probably helped convince most of us TNG was past due to pack it in.

Picard is coaching Data's acting when the Orient Express drives through Shakespeare's Tempest for no particular reason. That was the sane part. Hope you enjoyed it.

Long story short the Enterprise comes alive. Which would've been a pretty standard HAL9000 plot except they decided instead it should come alive by being infected with tinkertoys. Which they tried to explain with DeepakChopra-grade pop pseudoscientific mysticism like "complex systems can sometimes behave in ways that are entirely unpredictable" which you may as well replace with a .gif of writer Brannon Braga shrugging. Seriously, Destination: Void was better researched than this back in '65. To help you choke it all down, they even spend a few minutes trying to convince you a ship is already almost alive by spouting lines like "in a sense, it almost reproduces with the replicators" strongly suggesting Dr. Crusher doesn't know where babies come from, since unless the replicator's replicating functional miniature Enterprises that can grow up into starships, nothing it replicates in any way constitutes re-production of itself any more than you reproduce every time you clip your toenails.

 

If you think at least the "emergent" new life-form the Enterprise is gestating might serve as a pay-off to such claptrap, feel free to google it yourself; it looks like it came out of a Dr. Seuss book. For peak insanity (and a "so bad it's good" moment) witness Worf somehow generating real warp power by shoveling imaginary coal into a holodeck steam engine.

 

 

Even at ten years old I can remember walking away from Emergence's end credits with a feel of its utter irrelevance, and in retrospect this is caused by the fusilade of phlebotina necessary to patch together this excuse for a plot. <Something> magnetic infects the Enterprise with torso-sized <somethings> that apparently function like neurons or maybe ganglia or we've-never-opened-an-anatomy-book-because-we're-writers which turn the ship into <something> possibly intelligent but not really which can only express itself via holodeck characters (who have no trouble expressing themselves - wrap your head around that one) so Geordi does <something> to a torpedo which makes it do <something> to a planet-sized "nebula" to make it make <something> to feed the <something> in the cargo bay causing the <something> embodied in holodeck characters to do <something> turning the ship back to normal.

The End.

... or something...

 

Even David Lynch would balk at the sheer mass of contrivance here. There's writing psychedelic soft SF tacitly admitting a lack of justification, and then there's concatenating as many disparate elements as you can and hoping the audience will imagine you actually had some master plan while doing so.

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Abruptly forcing a character out of its original mold can go both ways. Take Troi, who lost her power in The Loss and was forced to pull rank on underlings in Disaster. Both changes were technically temporary and obviously intended to find a way to move her beyond being defined by her telepathy. They differ in grandiloquence, in what impact the writers assumed such a change should carry. The first played it as such a catastrophe shattering the poor darling's psyche that viewers could not but hope for a return to the status quo, while the second presented a challenge to be overcome and pushed her permanently in a more serious direction than the Enterprise's swooning drama queen. Riker to some extent captures this difference in his speech to Worf in Ethics to stop catastrophizing and playing the noble klingon, but that message gets snowed under the episode's emotional appeals. Instead of Worf learning to avoid falling prey to his klingon passions, he's pushed to fall prey to his human ones instead, presumably all the better to set up some ill-conceived nuclear family with Troi.

I was tempted to lump such plots together with telepathy or original series flavor alien deity possession (Masks overlaps the strongest) but mind-meld plots always seemed motivated by budget considerations. Cheaper to tell Spiner to pull a few faces and talk in a squeaky voice than design any new aliens. Episodes like these however stand apart as rather lavishly decorated with new sets, props and costumes, so they would have to be motivated by something else. Say, lack of creativity. Much like "drow that doesn't act drowish" RPG characters, they represent an older, more time-honored** brand of lazy shortcut to plot conflict. Thus quite a few of Worf's plots (broken back, discommendation, coming of age ceremony, etc.) exploit his fear of not being a full klingon - and by doing so prevent him from becoming a full character.

Geordi's probably the most interesting case study in that respect. Supposedly the visor prop was a literal headache to wear and Burton would gladly have been rid of it if it hadn't immediately caught on. Fully human, he lacked any other features to dramatically exploit (unless you count being a smart black guy in the era of Urkel, which proved too wormy a can for even Star Trek's writers to be stupid enough to open) so aside from bashing him as a dateless dweeb (a spot quickly re-filled by Barclay and immediately flip-flopped in turn) the visor was it. Except... well, try leaning just a little too hard on that crutch and you end up looking like you're constantly hurling abuse at the blind guy, leaving the issue of sight to linger subliminally. For all its horror flick insanity, Identity Crisis is probably the best episode I've listed here and allowed LaForge to exhibit a healthy mutually respectful friendship with a female former superior. Nevertheless I can't help but note even the blind guy's transformation into another species revolves around (in)visibility, and the return to normalcy is signaled by handing him his visor.

Episodes where the ship itself metamorphoses represents such radical character change taken to its logical extreme... and illogical absurdity. Tone down Masks' supernatural elements for instance and expand it to a miniseries covering years' worth of ship-time and you could have a fascinating study of an isolated population succumbing to cultural takeover, going native, converting to Masaka-ism one by one, deliberately redecorating their surroundings in Aztec-chic and sacrificing each others' beating hearts on ritual braziers. Full stories take full time to tell. The digest version looks like a six-year-old's make-believe where electrical wires are snakes, a dining room chair turns into a stone throne and talking in a funny voice gives you sun powers.

 

These metamorphosis, power loss or power gain plots plagued the series from the start. See Riker becoming a Q in season 1, so ludicrous the series couldn't deal with it in any other way than never speaking of it again. However, I doubt it's any accident that they became more... psychedelic, in the last season with the writing staff obviously grasping at straws. Claiming a character isn't himself (even when that character is the very ship) laid on an extra layer of suspended disbelief to justify desperate plot twists. Relax, Worf hasn't turned suicidal, it's just the SpinelessWorf(TM) that's suicidal. Even when the twists grew as terrible as coal-powered warp drives, at least the audience knew they'd get the real Enterprise back for next week's (hopefully better) episode.

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* Simplified: evolutionary adaptations don't arise "just in case" and redundant or obsolete features are gradually lost over generations due to energy expenditure; even assuming very violent lives, klingons would more likely grow armadillo armour than extra livers, extra hearts and some sort of separate brain stem that kickstarts their vital functions after they die. One redundant feature might possibly arise... but the laundry list cited by Worf's doctors would give chromosomes nightmares. Never mind that humanoids already have that redundancy in the single-origin form of bilaterality. Are klingons quadrilateral? And if so where's their extra face?

** 

Harold Zoid: A more classic movie plot there isn't: a son who does not want to follow in his father's business. And that business is being president of Earth, no less! The son, as it happens, is vice president. 

Bender: That plot makes perfect sense. Wink, wink.

 

Futurama - That's Lobstertaiment

Rebel Galaxy: all lightsabers, no browncoats

"Although it feels all-right it's still fake"

 

If Rebel Galaxy dated from the late '90s, I'd call it brilliant. If it had been made in 2010, I'd call it an avant-garde return to player-directed gameplay after the 2000s obsession with linear FPS slogs and MMO grinding. Given however that it came out in 2015, at the same time as Kerbal Space Program and three years after FTL, I can't really dredge up more enthusiasm than a tepid acknowledgement of mediocrity. It attempts to sell, to differentiate itself from the competition, based on a couple of scant superficialities - country music and broadsides - instead of any new features or at even creative re-imagining of old features.

You are a space captain. Except you're not. You're a space gunner with target assist and also a primitive helmsman steering a space-boat two-dimensionally. This is the high-friction space we've all grown to groan at, complete with EVE-style asteroid clumps and zoom-zoom warp drive effects... all of which might be excusable only in a game whose focus lay elsewhere. The immediately and loudly touted combat mechanic of charging up broadside volleys to crack open enemy capital ships is at a second glance revealed as nothing more than a standard arcade-style charge-up attack or FPS right-click zooming to land a shot. Captaining a large vessel would mean making strategic, tactical, resource and personnel decisions upon careful consideration and forward planning. Rebel Galaxy's just a simpleminded Space Invaders knock-off. At least it does include locational damage with forward, side and rear shields and armor, but that's just making me want to reinstall BattleTech instead.

Of course it does also couch these mechanics in a greater web of randomly-generated mission-running, bounty hunting and asteroid mining, but as rewarding as that routine can be, others like Mount&Blade offered more variety in the logistics, enemy types and terrain or other secondary considerations, five or ten years before.

 

This leaves us with the real reason Rebel Galaxy receives such gushing fanboy reviews: the space western aesthetic, complete with a soundtrack of rockabillies croonin' 'bout bein' bad boys and done wrong by fake love, etc. Except "space western" is an idiotic idea, quite possibly the most ridiculed misinterpretation and misuse of Science Fiction's potential since the '50s, Star Wars at its worst, at its most trite and cheesy. Firefly demonstated it is possible to get right, but did so by limiting the science fiction elements (e.g. no space opera wrinkly human aliens, no "warping") and restructuring the interplanetary setting as a civilization in decline, a postwar wasteland, a capitalist high-tech core with beggared neighbours, all serving to explain the otherwise highly unfeasible career of a smuggling interplanetary tramp steamer, a narrative necessity which seems completely lost in Rebel Galaxy's idiot appeal. Firefly even explicitly sidelined technological marvels like laser pistols to avoid the "fire laz0rz, pew-pew" mindset of interchangeably substituting lasers for bullets or spaceships for horses into which spacewesterns otherwise inevitaly fall.

I will concede one point of style: despite country rock not being my cuppa', Rebel Galaxy had the right idea in unabashedly pushing a distinctive soundtrack - though using songs with lyrics is an iffier choice, as they get older quicker by repetition. It's something I've repeatedly wished better games would have the courage to do. In fact, given its release year and (if not expansive) enthusiastically vocal following, Rebel Galaxy quite likely contributed to other developers' gradual shift away from the strict notion of limiting game music to generic, faded placeholder audio which dominated from ~2005-2015.

Still, there's no particular reason to buy or play Rebel Galaxy.

If you want spaceship command with randomized encounters and no pretense of realistic physics, play FTL.

If you want Newtonian spaceflight, play Kerbal.

If you want randomized mission-running and trade hub price juggling with FPS mechanics, play Mount&Blade.

Even if you want an oversimplified version of all that, a knock-off EVE-Online missing 90% of its functionality, it's still not worth investing in this five dollar game in a ten gallon hat. Just the following year, No Man's Sky came out, and for all its flaws incorporated all of Rebel Galaxy's gameplay as a mere afterthought... minus the space rockabillies.

Immortality, Inc.

"The scientific hereafter hadn't freed men from the fear of death, as it should have done. On the contrary, it had intensified their uncertainties and stimulated their competitive drive. Given the surety of an afterlife, man wanted to improve upon it, to enjoy a better heaven than anyone else."

 

I picked up my first Robert Sheckley short story collection at a book stand in a mountain resort town on the sort of occasion which boosts book sales in resort towns: a rainy day. It was one of those old-school 20th-century SciFi publications which just slapped some randomly commissioned stock image on the cover, in this case a gaggle of nondescript, toothy monstrosities looming at the reader, presumably because one of the stories included was titled "The Monsters" but as I was eleven years old and my grandmother and great-aunt not particularly well-versed in the Fi of Sci, our ad-hoc literary club deemed it a worthy enough purchase.

... and amazingly enough, it was!

Since then I've wondered time and again at how little mention Sheckley gets these days among the wider public, given his obvious influence among his peers. Maybe it's because he was a bit of a writer's writer, his stories always laced with self-conscious reversals or parodies of storytelling conventions. Maybe because he never stuck to a particular subgenre long enough to build himself a brand image, see-sawing between little green men, time travel, telepathy, space tech phlebotina or psychedelic fantasies at his whim.

In that sense, 1959's Immortality, Inc. has probably remained his most popular work because for most of its length it plays like a traditional 'everyman visits utopia' plot. Instead of blindsiding you with, say, a little green man in desperate need of exfoliant or 'in space kitchen, food eats you' the author provides a mediocre, relatable schmoe through whose eyes the audience can visit a glorious future in which the afterlife has been proven to exist. Spoiler alert: it ain't all it's cracked up to be... but humanity persists nonetheless, wheeling and dealing, controlling and rebelling in intrinsic patterns only modulated by new technology. The world continues to be what it is and the protagonist's narrative resolves neither by saving nor condemning it but merely seeing his personal conflicts through. Like Lem's Return from the Stars, this is more a novel about personal adaptability than dystopian social commentary. Even the science-zombies and science-ghosts are human, all too human.

However Immortality Inc.'s cultural impact might be better gauged by a case study. While Futurama parodied many SciFi subgenres and set pieces during its run(s) it owed quite a bit of its first few episodes' material to this book, from Fry recklessly deciding to go slumming in a deceptively familiar city and almost getting harvested, to one very memorable piece of futuristic machinery:

"Then he turned and entered the Suicide Booth, and closed the door behind him.

There were no windows, no furniture except a single chair. The instructions posted on one wall were very simple. You just sat down and, at your leisure, closed the switch upon the right arm."

 

While other plot devices like the abhumans (zombies in this case) grudgingly tolerated to live in the sewers are harder to pin directly to Sheckley's influence, one line in particular set me laughing aloud upon re-reading the book recently:

 

"I've been a junior yacht designer three times in two lifetimes."

"I'm a delivery boy!"

 

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P.S.: With lines like "For his body's limitations, far more than its capabilities, seemed to express his own particular essence" I have to reiterate Sheckley's incidental relevance to roleplaying games in particular. His awareness of the medium often forces his characters to decide how to play a role they've been assigned.

Vagrus Firstus Impressionus

"I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air,

And wondered where I was and how I came,

When a cloaked form against a campfire’s glare

Rose and approached, and called me by my name."

 

H.P. Lovecraft - Fungi from Yuggoth XVII - A Memory

__________________________________________________

 

Vagrus, that game that misspelled my name in the preorder credits, is one of the few things I've ever crowdfunded, so I fired it up wanting to like it. I did.

And I do.

I do like it. Moderately. Modestly. Meagerly. I just don't love it. I wish I could love it. Oh, Lost Pilgrims, let me help you to help me to love you!

And really, there's a lot to like. Especially a lot of writing. By which I mean there is a lot of writing, so you'd better like that sort of thing. While hardly epochal either in its world-building or individual encounters, Vagrus' mountains of text are obviously penned by a team steeped in roleplaying and fantasy literature, splitting the difference (as above) between indulgent clichés and refreshingly apt humor or drama growing naturally out of the world and characters you encounter.

 

Yes, this is fundamentally a spreadsheet game. You are the leader of a caravan in a post-apocalyptic Grome-ish fantasy setting (hey, Mad Max with dragons and magic wands, I got my wish!) and you must balance your ratio of pack beasts, longshore-elves and legionnaircenaries to ferry cargo and passengers across crumbled roads and monster-haunted deserts to the relative safety of towns, all while turning a profit and playing various factions and NPCs against each other. Trade goods are your least profitable but most reliable source of income, forming a reliable baseline to chasing the higher profit and adventure of fetch quests and story missions.

In both setting and mechanics, it shows the influence of any number of lauded RPG-adjacent titles like The Age of Decadence, Darkest Dungeon or Mount&Blade: Warband. Sadly, it falters a bit in implementation. AoD at its worst for instance was unsatisfyingly, gratuitously frustrating randomized combat (a system with zero room for error with non-zero randomized factors) but Vagrus does the same for your noncombat side as well, at least in the early game when you have no cash to spare. No amount of planning, no careful balancing will save you if a dice roll goes against you and a single worker abandons your caravan (slowing you down too much to reach the next town before your food/cash runs out) or if you find no randomized faction missions or passengers pointing in the direction you already need to travel. M&B:W in contrast featured even more randomization thanks to its FPS mechanics (catching a crossbow bolt to the face in combat meant the fight was instantly over) but dampened its impact, as no single combat was ever a Game Over scenario, but a manageable challenge to rebuild. Here though, failing your current quest or trade run, any trade run, just forces reload after reload, resulting in far more aggravating redundancy.

It also misses the point of variation in combat.

 

 

While large-scale combats pit your caravan's nameless redshirt guards in a simple numeric clash of portraits, quests (and optional whittling down of enemy forces) are handled through a 2D tactical companion combat with a forward and back row. Looks interesting at first, but at the moment it's both Vagrus' weakest point and where it painted itself into a corner. To wit: there are too few companions. Darkest Dungeon made 1-dimensional combat formations work by the huge amount of freedom available in group composition and ability combos. Vagrus sticks you with the same mooks, each with the same abilities, for combat after combat... after combat after combat after combat. You might say "hey, no biggie, we just need more content in the form of more companions" but because companions also give your caravan passive bonuses (and must be leveled up from your own experience points) it will prove very difficult to balance out their tactical availability with their necessary strategic scarcity and leveling costs. The only solutions I can see at the moment are diversifying companion ability pools via items or being allowed to bring a redshirt or two into tactical combat, which would only marginally ameliorate the drudgery and water down the whole concept.

There are other problems as well, like losing companions permanently if you fail their attitude mini-game, with the added issue of getting only vague hints as to their preferences (define "cruelty" in a survival-themed game, I Frostpunk-dare you) and this leads into the main issue. While most games are either overly-scripted or overly-randomized, Vagrus somehow manages both at once. For all their choose-your-own-adventure aspirations, Vagrus' developers obviously have a very, very strict idea of how you should play, and the slightest deviation from those invisible railroad tracks can cost you hours' worth of effort. You are not told, for instance, that herbalism can net you effortless cash in the starter town every visit. Or the location of merchants for special goods like sculptures. Or the difficulty or specific level/skill/army/companion/gear requirements of quests. For example, I have zero chances of winning that fight against the necromancer above, despite the fact I was sent there from the starter town after randomly recruiting one particular companion only weeks into my campaign and its location is within the general starting area.

 

Other nuisances might be solved numerically. The "crowded camps" morale debuff for instance is a ham-fisted means of punishing player success and kicks in at too low a threshold. Low-gross trade goods like mushrooms also need larger stack sizes and lax market glut softcaps if they're to ever be worth picking up, as they don't serve dual purpose in feeding your army like you could with grain/bread in M&B. More content (mook variety, rebalancing caravan utility gear, and especially more companions) will help greatly to flesh out Vagrus' options.

Still, being forced to backtrack three hours or reroll altogether because you visited town X by taking the right road in the wrong direction, triggering some fixed pop-up event when it breaks up your trade run... is bullshit. This is not an '80s arcade, you're not trying to get my spare quarters, "play again Y/N" is not a valid pop-up message, being punished to the point of a loss condition simply for not having played before does not reward either strategy or roleplay or any other player quality. To be fair, unlike Don't Starve and its mindlessly repetitive ilk, Vagrus is self-conscious of the distinction between surprises and "rocks fall, everyone dies" and does try to strike a balance via tavern rumors, but so far it has yet to balance out a reasonable risk chance and palpable losses against wasting the customer's time unnecessarily, as M&B or DD succeeded in doing. I will say that if you plan on playing it in its current state, at least cheat and look up companion recruitment spots, skills and abandonment conditions, as you'll need to plan your entire campaign around them.

On the bright side, Vagrus has plenty to work with: an engaging, richly detailed, more thoughtful fantasy world filled with interesting decisions, a multifaceted economic baseline encouraging forward thinking and an ambitious array of gameplay levels from tactical to strategic to managerial and roleplaying. I don't regret preordering, have already given the game its own tag here and have every intention of revisiting it... six or twelve months from now when it will have hopefully received more content/balance patches... and maybe will have spelled my name right in its credits!

Safe travels for now Vagri. I'm off to Bannerlord.

Unregulated Dream Architecture

The latest dream I can remember had me hired to manage a failing grocery store branch on the bad side of town. There was an antagonistic WASP district manager with a bad moustache, black gangbangers playing hoops in the parking lot, dingy mop buckets, sinks and toilet stalls in the unpartitioned office area, run-down city buses dropping off gritty, hyper-critical immigrant grandmothers to finger my cantaloupes, shoplifting teenagers and a sassy yet relatable latina love interest just waiting to expound her hard luck backstory.

 

Sometimes you wake up to justified disappointment at your subconscious' lack of creativity, cribbing every generic, clichéd B-series drama you ever watched when there was nothing else on TV. Then you might rub your eyes, stumble into the bathroom and just stand there a few seconds when you remember the one detail that just... wait, what the fffff- huh?!?

Chumpanions of the Righteous

"'Cause they know who is righteous, what is bold

(So I'm told)

[...]

Beware all those angels with their wings glued on

'Cause deep down

They are frightened and they're scared

If you don't stare"

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Cherub Rock

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Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a... passable cRPG featuring above average combat encounters (marred by a lack of tiles for turn-based precision, plus over-reliance on luck-based reloads, and 'mythic' freebie abilities obviating much of your actual class progression) but a roleplaying side stretched thin between infantile pandering, the same four alignment choices for every encounter and underdeveloped or railroaded player paths. Worse, NPCs closest to you (the Baldur's Gate -style companions and the questgivers who'll be talking your ear off the entire campaign) are all slightly under-developed (albeit overly-verbose) and mostly run the gamut from trite to outright infuriating. So for this post I'll run through my CN halfling witch-lich's friend list.

 

Spoilers are of course implied.

 

Well, here they are, starting with the ones I missed or didn't even bother with, then roughly escalating in order of quality.

Finnean

To pad out a lack in design which I myself criticized in Owlcat's previous Pathfinder release, you're given a weapon that can morph to suit your specialty. All well and good, except he's a talking weapon introduced as a plucky, quirky comic relief sidekick (a gimmick very easy to misuse) so I told him to shut up and sold him to the first vendor at the bar to fund a tower shield specialist mercenary.

(At least Finnean doesn't count toward your party size total.)

Lann: LN? LG? monk. Didn't play him because I opted for Wenduag instead, but like her, his stats seem made for a flexible range/melee build. He's the "nice" path to their shared quest. While Octavia and Regongar from Kingmaker worked as divergent interpretations of shared upbringing, Lann and Wenduag are portrayed as more extreme in their schism to the point of irreconcilable (at least from her viewpoint) and which pair lends finer nuance to their conflict may be a matter of interpretation.

Nenio: ?? (apparenly NN) wizard. Hated her introductory dialogue so much that I turned on her on the spot. Basically, any time pop culture doesn't portray intelligent people as stuffy stick-in-the-muds, the only alternative is an abrasive, incongruously clueless motormouth. I don't need an Urkel in my party, much less one whose baseless insults you're expected to meekly absorb and applaud for being born the correct sex. Basically everything I hate about everyone's misinterpretation of my own standard character type of CN spellcasters, so I gave her the boot... though as she and Ember seem your only workable choices for arcane casters, you're probably forced to adopt one or another of the overentitled little bitches.

However you may wish to characterize the speech patterns of hyperintelligent free spirits, a children's cartoon nerd parody ain't it. Most aggravatingly, this bitch's personal quest apparently ties into the game's overarching B-plot (The Secrets of Creation) meaning you're expected to keep Urkel glued to your ass for a hundred hours, at least on a first run-through. Which I most certainly did not.

Lich Companions. The Lich mythic path proves pleasingly individualistic in building up your very own army of undead. You can even "recruit" (read:zombify, complete with tormented groans) a full party of undead companions, whose inherent motivation or conflict in being raised from the dead lays out some of the most promising character arcs in the campaign... yet none of which have much to say, probably as Owlcat avoided dedicating much writing time to characters available on only one path. I will admit it works within the theme of deathly silence by which they describe your effect on the world, but still...

Ciar: never got a chance to zombify him, maybe as a result of indulging the barbarian underling's request for glorious death by combat?

Staunton: glaive-wielding warpriest whose attribute / feat array make him jaw-droppingly bad at both the "war" and "priest" parts. At least you get him early enough (early Act 3) that you can partially pad out his build, and what the hell, I like a challenge.

Delamere: insanely powerful archery slayer. By level 16 she could salvo baelors in the Alushinyrra arena.

Kestoglyr: tragic ex-paladin fighter you can revive in the last zone of Act 4, becomes usable only in Act 5. Dual-wields scimitars, so he seemed the logical choice to multi-class to rogue (rowdy, specifically) as an undead place-filler for Woljif. Can gain a personal weapon in the Ineluctable Prison by reuniting him with his lady love, though currently that weapon set is locked, meaning the dual-wielding specialist can't dual-wield anything with his dual-wielding-bonus +5 scimitar. Inspired design there.

Queen Galfrey: ghost bard (incidentally, cool name for a band) While I'm generally annoyed at how late in the campaign you get some companions, making it hard to plan your group composition, some are truly 11th-hour appearances and Galfrey in particular is only recruitable in the next-to-last adventure zone. Justified to some extent as a dramatic reversal of your campaign's start signifying your ascension to power as lich... but still. You'd think a bard of all people wouldn't be so late to the party. What makes her truly annoying are her romantic overtones, her descriptions constantly struggling to squeeze pity out of you, and the fact you never get to call her out on her stupendously stupid leadership decisions, even after raising her as a ghost.

 

Arushalae: CN ranger - not that she acts as anything other than Stupid Good given her singleminded worship of her goddess, cloying niceness and neediness and constantly rehashed romantic overtones. A reformed succubus and blatant teacher's pet, from her infantile lack of personality to her attributes being padded to double anyone else's to the fact she is literally indestructible! Unlike say, Grieving Mother from PoE, her religious conversion and saccharine reinforcement as a cute little girl (including by Anevia, of all people) render any guilt over her troubled past a foregone redemptive conclusion.

Arushalae is basically to Falls-From-Grace from Planescape: Torment what Qara from NWN2 was to Ignus and what Grobnar was to Jan from BG2: an insultingly simpleminded pale immitation. But unlike them she's pushed in the player's face and given a tediously overextended personal quest in which nothing happens (for a bonus, the nothing happens in a dream) under the assurance that nobody could possibly dislike her warbling about her fee-fees... which is of course what makes her so utterly insufferable!

Seelah: LG paladin. Along with the NPCs Anevia and Irabeth, part of a trio of bad girls made good, slightly edgy, antiheroic flavored, but nonetheless card-carrying heroines of the crusade. The only one who really owns it is pragmatic Anevia, and I'd much rather have recruited her than Seelah whose constant reminders of 'I grew up on the mean streets of etcetera' and side quests with her alternate adventuring party get old very quickly. Worse yet, the game tries to strongarm you into bringing her along as the only designated meat-shield out of a score of companions. Handy reminder: you can recruit mercenaries.

 

Ember: NG witch. No less a teacher's pet than Arushalae, though lacking the other's stat fudging. Adorable little girl whom you're expected to coddle and praise at every single step despite doing nothing but spouting inane platitudes, and to whose every whim the very multiverse must bend. I kept expecting her personal quest would at some point explore the obvious logical flaws in her basic setup, only for Mary to Sue harder with every chapter. Like the talking sword with abandonment issues from Deadfire, I have to wonder whether she was intentionally written as badly as possible or simply handed off to some lobotomized teenage fanfic writer. Needless to say she's always given the last word in campfire exhanges.

Ember's misconceived antics veer into unintentional comedy when you realize none of her interactions have anything to do with her character. Name one trait remaining relevant past her introduction. She doesn't elf, she doesn't witch, she doesn't crow, she doesn't orphan; her character sheet may as well read "Klingon proctologist" for all it matters!

 

Daeran: NE oracle. Naughty pretty-boy who serves as your best healer. In practical terms he's statted well, though his oracle handicap (limited movement at the start of combat) means you'll be playing defensively with him around. Decently conceived companion quest, but though he gets pages upon pages of dialogue, he's unfortunately built entirely around his role as 'dangerous' romance novel toy-boy who needs you to save him from his inner demons, so his every interaction boils down to a simpleminded evil-lite 'oooooh, aren't I oh-so naughty and enticing? And rich. And well-dressed. Have I mentioned I'm rich lately? And naughty-naughty!'

 

Sosiel: NG cleric. Practically, Sosiel's main problem is being a moderate-constitution cleric in medium armor, though even more than Staunton you get him early enough to try to make it work. Thematically, his fundamentally uncreative quest for his m.i.a. brother actually ranks one of the campaign's better-executed stories, but unfortunately Sosiel himself comes across as blandly nice - presumably to suit his role as the good boy romantic counterpart to Daeran.

Trever: CN ... lots of things. Sosiel's ex-paladin brother. Too bad you only get him at the end of Act 4 so he'd be hard to fit into your party as yet another offensive melee fighter, even if his build didn't indicate his troubled life history by being scattered between fighter-ish classes with no synergy. On the other hand, it's a nice deliberate sacrifice to make for the sake of roleplaying, for anyone who wants to see the Sosiel / Trever power duo through to Wrath's end. Me, I had zombies to raise so I did them both a favor and packed them both off home soon after rescuing him. Have a nice life bros, you've earned it.

Camellia: ?E shaman. Rapier specialist. Takes about five seconds to realize she's evil, soon as you ask yourself just exactly who would be hiding her alignment in a paladin-infested city. However, her spoiled brat persona gets toned down after her first appearance, and in direct counterpoint to Daeran's preciousness her quest arc follows through on her basic precept, turning out to be a thoroughly, irredeemably evil bitch manipulating you and abusing your leniency toward her to indulge her sadism. Honestly didn't think they'd go through with it. Line by line the writing ain't winning no prizes, but solid and well executed concept nonetheless. I eventually killed her back at the mansion when she clearly plummeted below my own Pandemonium on the good-evil scale.

 

Greybor: NN slayer. Dual-axe offense would fit well in a game with more max-CON sword-and-board companions to balance out your front line, but doesn't mesh with Wrath's already redundant lineup of dual-wielding and two-handers, especially with overpowered archers providing most of your damage. However, his companion quest positions him, along with Regill, as a sorely-needed reminder that likeability should not equate to appreciation, the antithesis to Ember and Arushalae and Daeran and Seelah and Nenio and Finnean's infantilism. A cold-blooded appreciation for each other's quality is all you need, growing slowly, cautiously to camaraderie and proven trust without the need for maudlin recitations.

Woljif: CN rogue (of the spellcasting variety, ugh, this mangled class system) Though you're better off focusing on his physical abilites to keep him functional in melee, he makes a dandy buffbot as a secondary caster and is by far your best trickster. More work also seems to have gone into his dialogues (with good voice acting to boot) to where he's arguably the best fleshed-out character in the game, with a personal quest exploring a reasonable spectrum of tiefling possibilities. Wise-cracking without seeming intrusive, with a hard luck backstory that never veers into the outright sappy and an ascension to power that remains within the scope of game mechanics (unlike some others here) he pretty much stands as proof that Wrath's worst points stem less from inability than from deliberate pandering to the idiot market.

 

Wenduag: NE fighter. Once again, shaky alignment, as Wenduag acts out an excellent portrayal of archetypal CE. Only wanting to be chieftess re-qualifies her as non-chaotic.

First though it's worth mentioning her stat build, because in a game full of archer / bruiser redundancy, her very flexibility as STR / DEX fighter makes her a nightmare to level up. Unless you know all the other companions ahead of time, she keeps getting made redundant by the flavor of the Golarian month. I started her off with bows and (to make use of the first good two-hander you find) glaives. Cue Staunton and his glaive. So I picked up more longbow feats. Cue Delamere and Arushalae. So I completely retrained her for falchions. Cue Trever. By late Act 4 I was about ready to retrain her again as a freakin' bard with harmonica feats, but for fear some damn harmonica-prodigy angel would descend from on high just to screw up my weapon distribution yet again. That I was considering a scimitar just as I found Kestoglyr proved my exasperation well-founded.

However, Wenduag's Stupid Evil tendencies are what make her both contentious (going by forum chatter) and a surprisingly decent character by the end. Sadly, some of her quest prompts (especially in Act 4) are unenlighteningly written or outright absent, making it hard to get her "good" quest ending without cheating.

Don't get me wrong, Wenduag is a horrible, horrible person, and that's what makes her a good character, for living updown to one of the hardest companion types to portray aptly (albeit a frequent player personality) the rabid dog. You're basically talking about characters who will turn on their allies as soon as the opportunity for mischief arises... which is exactly what Wenduag does, unable to resist the temptation of promised power and swearing fealty left and right, and with INT 10, WIS 12 and CHA let's-not-even-talk-about-it, she plays out the role of a born sucker, just barely savvy enough and socially inept so as to outsmart herself in her allegiances. Her argument for why you should let her live after her final betrayal even makes sense: she doesn't even bother trying to convince you that she's flipped some moral switch but only that you've demonstrated your dominance in the excruciating fashion she can understand, and finally removed her best available temptation. You can follow her trainwreck of thought.

I'll stand by Wenduag as I stood by Qara because while she still lags behind better versions (Ignus or Kills-in-Shadow (who incidentally would fit the NE type better for her more stable fealty)) she fits a difficult companion role better than most games would even try.

 

Regill: LE fighter who acts LN. His climactic self-sabotage in service of the cause, which somehow comes across as more meaningful than mere martyrdom for so thoroughly fathoming his fellows' mentality, stands out as the most memorable moment in any Wrath companion quest. Like others here, his alignment is shaky at best, as you never see much malice or malfeasance to justify an "evil" designation beyond indifferently neutral pragmatism or martial callousness.

While yet again his gimped build is difficult to work around (a max-DEX fighter in heavy armor) he hits hard enough with those freaky little double hammers to edge out poor Trever and Staunton for pure practicality.

However, he amasses more style points even by mid-game than any of the rest could hope to. Oddly enough for a themed campaign opposing almost entirely CE enemies, lawful companions are in short supply. I don't know about Lann, but Seelah's lawfulness gets completely drowned out by sappy "power of friendship" plot excuses, so Regill alone ends up picking up a lot of the slack in both reliability and common sense. In a roster full of whiny prima-donnas he and Greybor are usually the only ones opting on no-frills gettin' shit done, which you'd think would count for more on THE VERY DOORSTEP OF EVIL INCARNATE!!!

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Conclusions?

1) By sheer numbers, I was surprised to find most of Wrath's companions... bearable, or even intriguing in the last few cases, contrary to my overall impression of them as insufferable little preening twits. It appears rather the case that the politically correct cretins are simply given more screen time, longer personal quests and more dramatic interactions than their better alternatives. Most of Regill's lines, for instance, come during council meetings, which are so tediously numerous and overextended as to prompt click-through. The worst companions are shoved in your face right from the start (Seelah, Nenio, Ember) while some of the most promising (Trever, Lich's zombies) are 11th-hour additions.

 

2) While Owlcat learned a lot of lessons from Kingmaker, their interpretation of the alignment system remains shaky. Characters receive their L/C/G/E designations as much by a top-down partitioning of roles according to arbitrarily designated representation quota as they earn them via their own actions.

3) Aside from being portrayed as nauseatingly good/cute/sexy-badass (with the notable exception of Wenduag) most female companions' stats are min-maxed and outright inflated (Arushalae, holy shit!) to make them look as good as possible, while the males' stats are wrecked for their assigned role (Staunton, Sosiel, Regill, Trever) so as to reinforce the womandatory "man bad, woman good" bashing without which nothing may be published. If you want to handicap yourself for a challenge, try running a sausage party in Wrath. Ironically, being less idealized actually makes the menfolk more interesting.

 

4) The most engaging are neither the most ingratiating (Ember) nor the most extreme (Camellia) but those which best own their basic nature.

 

5) RPG romance needs to die in a fire. Or in ice. Or down a hole. Or up a hole. I honestly don't care how, just get rid of this idiocy. Look at how much damage it's done in Wrath. Arushalae was obviously designed from the ground up as a romance option. Galfrey instead of being scrutinized as a leader becomes a stand-in for anyone who wanted to bang Princess Peach. Daeran and Sosiel's personalities are crippled by it. At least Camellia and Wenduag's motivation in coming on to me made sense in context (playing on male protectiveness) but it still diverges too abruptly from the campaign's general concerns. Half your damn companion roster keeps stumbling over their own gonads!

You want romance? Make a porn spin-off and sell it separately.

 

6) They sort of fail at the BG tradition of companions, which interacted with the rest of the campaign more or less regularly, either expositing, cracking jokes or bitching you out over your RP choices. Wrath's roster on the other hand is verbally absent, aside from a few one-liners by Woljif and rare alignment-based issues like Seelah abandoning me due to my lich-craft. (Good riddens.) This uneven intrusion into your campaign lends more weight to their fewer (but often lengthier than in old games) interactions, boosting annoying moments' nuisance by volume. Maybe even Arushalae would've been more bearable if she didn't blindside you with "let's go talk about an imaginary picnic table for fifteen minutes... AGAIN"

7) As the audience for this new medium grew up over the past decades, computer games (especially cRPGs) should have matured with them (or at least progressed through adolescence) and this has sadly not happened. Though the campaign is not completely lacking in nuance, Wrath's special little companion snowflakes strutting their pre-chewed moralism and expectations of social sanction keep bringing to mind one particular descriptor: infantile.

 

These are the perfectly superior/transgressive/dependent best friends a sixth-grade bully expects to have, the social approval prescribed by our lowest common denominator: a cute little girl lecturing others on their badness, a sexy, sassy, classy femme fatale, a feudal playboy, a desperate for approval black amazon with a hard luck backstory, a sex goddess trying to be good if only you'll love her, a know-it-all who probably can't get any friends besides you and who'll let you cheat off her notes for the secrets of creation exam... and the cheerful, helpful little buddy you keep in your pocket, willing to be anything for you. This is not an RPG group. It's a mean girl's entourage.

 

One wonders whether Owlcat's hoping to capture an audience of sixth-graders, or merely one stunted at that mental level.