Category: Games & Game Design
“My Large Adult Son Committed A Few Warcrimes” – It’s Trails of Cold Steel 3 (Again)
This is going to be a fairly comprehensive look at Trails of Cold Steel 3 and as a result is probably going to be best read if you have played the game already. It isn’t often that a game makes a big enough changed impression on me to want to discuss its story at length both at the midway point and the conclusion, but – and this may be a flaw in some ways – it backloads a lot of its plot, and does so in a way that works effectively as a mirror of the way CS1 saw tranquility fall apart.
And while this article is going to go into some heavy places in terms of discussing the game’s political themes and inspirations, it’s important to remember it’s also very funny a lot of the time. Some of the jokes are wearing, particularly the “comedy lesbian” characters, but a lot of the time there are some sharp scenes and charming interactions. It’s worth considering it in comparison to a game I watched a playthrough of recently, Tales of Symphonia 2. That was a sequel to a beloved RPG that brought back, as visiting characters, the old party. It did so in a way that mostly annoyed the player, as it felt that character development was undone and beloved characters were reduced to one-note gimmicks and punchlines. CS3 largely avoids that; it remembers that the party have all matured as characters, have now settled down into new jobs and it offers a fairly charming depiction of a circle of friends trying to recapture the old magic.
“It’s Great to Hear From You Again, We Should Catch Up Some Time When Work Calms Down a Bit.” – Initial Thoughts on Trails of Cold Steel 3
For all, with distance, I can see the grain of some good ideas in Trails of Cold Steel 2 it is fundamentally a weirdly paced, unrewarding game which serves some necessary story purpose – marking the characters’ development from students reacting to an unfair world to young adults trying to take action against it – but does so in a slow, inconsequential fashion. The story it covers needed to be told to bridge 1 and 3 both for political and character developments, and I am unsure how exactly it could have been done better, but nevertheless I am very glad Cold Steel 3 has gone in a different direction and made something thematically and narratively stronger.
Spoilers for the Trails of Cold Steel series follow.
“My Choice In Friends Might Have Caused a Slight International Incident” – Schools, Politics and War in “Fire Emblem Three Houses” and “Trails of Cold Steel”
School-set RPGs are not uncommon as a concept and so do not, themselves, need much specific introduction or explanation. Nevertheless, there is a subset that I find somewhat more interesting – those which take the idea of an academy for the young and influential to learn martial and political skills so they may become future leaders. The big one, for a while, was Trails of Cold Steel; I’ve written in the past about its slight inability to land its heavier political themes, and the inescapable tension between its ideas of personal friendship and intrinsic goodness versus wider-scale conflict. I like it a lot, despite its flaws (and will merrily play Cold Steel 3 and 4 when the chance arises) but it is a series of games, like Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4, that raises a lot of very interesting critical arguments.
This article contains significant spoilers for Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 2 and Fire Emblem Three Houses.
Tabletop Game Review: Acceptable Loss
It’s been a while since I reviewed one of these narrative games, but a recent conversation about the RPG Dread and its use of a physical, inevitable death timer in a Jenga tower to evoke the progression of a horror film got me revisiting a game from the collection I downloaded.
Acceptable Loss (by @rpgnatalie ) is a simple game, although perhaps a little more complex than Dread in order to expand the theming and add an almost competitive element. It sits in a very strange place between competition and co-operation as, in contrast to the usual social contract that the GM-player relationship should be more than simple hostility the “GM” figure (or closest analogue as there is not a usual table power structure here) plays an embodiment of hostility pushing inevitably towards the other character’s death.
Tabletop Game Review: Laser Beams Like So Many Stars
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Laser Beams… is by Taylor Smith (@whimsymachine)
In the game’s own words, its premise is as follows:
“You are a huge fan of mechs and their amazing pilots. You love to watch their heroics on the news, you visit when pilots come to your town, you own multiple letterman jackets emblazoned with mech pilots’ insignias. You’re burdened with the dream of piloting, eclipsed by the fear that you will never be more than a spectator. You love that which is unfathomably above you. Let’s talk about that.”
Tabletop Game Review – 6 Minutes of Power Remaining
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Note: This article also includes some references to personal experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes.
6 Minutes of Power Remaining is by Kris Ruff
A lot of the games in the Emotional Mecha Jam focus on humanising the mech in these mecha stories – often through making it a role played by a player, whether or not it is actually a sentient AI. This opens the theming of the games up to wider questions touching on those explored by cyberpunk fiction; whether or not a meaningful bond can exist between a human and an inanimate, or non-sapient object. And, indeed, when one considers the relationships forged in war between human and AI, there is the question of whether something made as a weapon can feel friendship or love.
Tabletop Game Review – Death Sentence
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Note: This article also includes some references to personal experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes in detail.
It took a lot longer than I initially assumed it would for me to find the right words to review Jeff Ellis’ (@manyeyedmonster’s) Death Sentence; I thought it would be a straightforward review, as I had very easily discussed the thematically similar 36 Minutes as an exploration of unglamorous death in military science-fiction. I think I needed time to unpack my thoughts, and perhaps the immediacy of my response to 36 Minutes was part of why I couldn’t launch straight into forming opinions on Death Sentence. Any game that goes into death beyond killing as a natural mechanic of conflict resolution is going to be personal, and potentially troubling, for the player. You could very well say that even in a game where the expectation is one will fight death should be personal and troubling.
Tabletop Game Review – 36 Minutes
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Note: This article also includes some references to experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes in detail.
Christine Prevas’ (@cprevas) 36 Minutes is not an enjoyable game to play. It sits strangely within the genre it evokes because it plays out in real time a very particular sequence of suffering and death that absolutely would have a huge, unwelcome emotional impact on some players. You could roleplay it differently, and if anything make it more fitting within its genre, but I think doing so would require a significant distancing between player and character that the game does not necessarily encourage. Perhaps that is the intention; it certainly feels like something intended to take players out of the safely expected bravado of what is often a heroic, noble kind of war story. On the other hand, if you are trying to do something like that, something that wholly subverts the usual methods of a genre to question its implicit associations, that in turn is an act which needs interrogation.
Two Illustrative Playthroughs of “Alone in the Station Remnants”
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
These two pieces of short fiction are my attempts to play the solitaire RPG Alone in the Station Remnants.
The most interesting thing I found about the experience was the challenge it presented in holding two registers or prose voices in mind and being able to switch between the two, presenting a narrative from two very different and incompatible approaches.
Tabletop Game Review – Alone in the Station Remnants
Note: This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
A screenshot from Ace Combat 7 (2019), illustrating perhaps the sort of derelict military spaces that AitSR is about exploring.
Alone in the Station Remnants by caro (@seaexcursion) is, a very interesting solitaire writing exercise/character piece; solitaire roleplaying games, in the form of journalling or letter-writing games, are fascinating to me as a writer and fan of fiction and I greatly enjoy trying them in their various forms. A modification of Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars, a game of space exploration and painting expansive, dreamlike worlds, Alone in the Station Remnants brings the scale down to the intimate level, and adds an interesting parallel narrative aspect that absolutely sold it to me as good.
Ideas Without End 