Dungeon Divin' Done Right

Game: The Lost City of Barakus
System: d20/Pathfinder/Swords & Wizardry
Publisher: Necromancer Games and Frog God Games
Authors: W.D.B. Kenower and Bill Webb
Initial Release: November 1, 2003

Frog God Games, publisher of Swords & Wizardry and successor company to the late great d20 publisher Necromancer Games, produce a diverse range of products that nonetheless share a very particular flavor. With few exceptions, they take place in a high-magic, vaguely medieval fantasy world reminiscent of Greyhawk or Blackmoor - i.e., vanilla D&D - but wherein all of civilization is a thin veneer on a decaying world beneath which malignant gods, forgotten horrors, and eldritch abominations constantly threaten to corrupt and devour all that lives. In other words, it’s more Howard and Lovecraft than Faerun and Forgotten Realms. This gels well with Frog God’s old-school, high-stakes philosophy that players should feel free to explore wherever they wish, but that poking around in deep dark places is substantially more likely to see them murdered than doing the murdering.

The Lost City of Barakus, a Necromancer d20 module republished by Frog God for Pathfinder and Swords & Wizardry with fresh layouts, content, and errata, is perhaps the perfect embodiment of that philosophy.  One part city sandbox, one part wilderness hex crawl, and one part megadungeon, Lost City is all parts danger and excitement. The 176-page module (PF version) comes recommended for character levels 1-5, but there’s more than enough content here to keep them busy well beyond that. My own players didn’t wrap up the bulk of it until level 7, and there are still plenty of secrets they haven’t uncovered - and yet may, since the module’s flagship city of Endhome has become a major hub for their high-level adventures. 

For all that that the titular megadungeon Barakus gets top billing, the Free City of Endhome is every bit as core to the module’s success. Capable of being plopped into any homebrew campaign or used as a springboard for Frog God’s larger Lost Lands campaign setting, Endhome is as richly detailed and interesting a place to explore as any standalone city module this side of Frog God’s own Bard’s Gate. Intrigue abounds in the superficially unassuming city-state, and if your players are anything like mine they will find themselves embroiled in political plots, a temple front hiding a continent-spanning slave ring operation, monstrous sewer infestations, a full-fledged Wizard’s Academy, and a motherfucking vampire mafia family to please all the Masquerade fans in the audience from barely the moment they step foot in Endhome. These obvious major quest hooks are just the beginning. Endhome’s various locales and NPCs are chock full of seeds for stories branching into the surrounding Duskmoon Hills (the aforementioned hex crawl) and other modules in the Lost Lands universe that can easily be substituted for the DM’s homebrew locations of choice. 

Whether you decide to start the players in the relative “safety” of Endhome or use one of the several proffered plot hooks that have them travel there through Duskmoon, the real crazy shit begins outside the city walls. On the tamer end of the spectrum we have delightfully varied random encounter tables, a corrupted forest, and a band of dashing highwaymen clad in green who will happily relieve the party of their wealth to “redistribute” in their own woodland camp. On the more vicious (and shamelessly old school) end we have abandoned wizard towers, desecrated temples to dark deities, a volcano-dwelling red dragon, and, of course, Barakus itself.

Hidden beneath an enormous upper cave system that could itself stand alone as a top-notch D&D introductory dungeon, players could easily miss Barakus entirely if it weren’t right there in the title to pique their curiosity. A little more coherent than your average megadungeon - thanks in part to its epic backstory and an only-somewhat-batshit monster ecology - Barakus will please both the loot-crazed murderhobos and aspiring actors of your party alike. Running five levels deep and change (and featuring a tantalizing thoroughfare to the Underdark and Matt Finch’s Cyclopean Deeps), Barakus is stuffed to the gills with everything you could ever hope to find in the abandoned city of an advanced elder race. Bizarre mechanical contraptions, deadly traps, mysterious magical artifacts, forgotten monstrosities - Barakus has it all in scale. For a “lost” city Barakus seems to be experiencing a surprising population boom. Tribes of goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, roving drow up from the Underdark, and stranger beings all vie for control of the wealth-littered ruins even as they too struggle to survive against the more monstrous denizens, offering ample opportunities for alliances, faction play, and even, in my players’ case, all-out war. 

The cherry on top (or rather the bottom) of it all is the inevitable Big Bad Boss of the joint. This fresh take on an old favorite lies imprisoned in a lair hidden beneath so many secrets and Zelda-style puzzle levels your players may well never encounter it. But if they do, they’d better hope they’re well-prepared. The boss - like the almost equally dangerous thing waiting above his prison - is deadly enough in its default state, but practically a guaranteed total party kill if your players are anything other than the cautiously thoughtful types capable of out-scheming the creature. Not that they’re likely to have made it this far without an eleven-foot-pole mentality in the first place.

I could gush about this module for ages. I could also spend paragraphs ranting about its problems. The black-and-white art ranges from the forgettable to the downright embarrassing, but what do you expect - it’s a d20-era OGL product. Much more critically, the Frog God reprint was a missed opportunity to fix some glaring errors, omissions, and design issues that will frustrate a DM throughout. For all that the book tends to provide exactly the right amounts of world detail, its map, chart, and stat block placements defy all logic, and the lack player-ready room descriptions in the dungeons is a big “fuck you” to any DM wanting to run this without thorough preparation. Some rooms are completely incomprehensible even to the DM without cross-reference to the maps and other levels. The absence of an index in a piece of clockwork this complex is a baffling flaw unfortunately shared with many other Frog God products. For all its qualities, the city of Endhome, as laid out, is borderline unusable without tabs, hand notations, and careful pre-session study if only to correct all the errata Frog God never bothered to fix. You’ll also likely need a magnifying glass just to read the legend on some of the maps.

In spite of all that, I and my players can't stop talking about what an uncommonly great piece of work this book is. It’s rare enough to see a good sandbox that pulls together as a cohesive whole, let alone one that marries so well to a developed, dynamic city setting. The Lost City of Barakus really is the complete package, and would that it were the model for sandbox modules everywhere. 

Lacking in Street Smarts

Game: Street Fighter V
Capcom, 2016 (PS4 version reviewed)

I haven’t played a lot of Street Fighter since Street Fighter II first rocked my world on the SNES. They don’t seem to have gotten much better since. Even three months of patches and content updates since its initial release, Street Fighter V remains a tragic mess of a multiplayer experience and a cautionary tale of how even the best underlying game mechanics can be ruined by the systems and interfaces surrounding them.

And it really is a tragedy how much SFV does right. Like Street Fighter IV it manages to transition the series’ classic 2D visuals to a vibrant 3D palette, maintaining nearly the same hitboxes and animation frames while adding a level of grace and fluidity to the characters’ motions that sprites could never quite achieve. I can’t ultimately say I prefer the move to three dimensions in a fundamentally two dimensional game - there’s always something about visible polygons I can never quite appreciate on the level of a hand-drawn character, or the seamlessly convincing faux-sprites of, say, Guilty Gear Xrd - but if we have to drag these games into the third dimension, I’m glad they’re still as pleasing to look at as this. 

It’s a tale as old as time...

At its core SFV plays like a dream. I’m no fighting game pro by any stretch - the only series I’ve ever been able to claim even something like competence in was Soul Calibur - but to my novice hands SFV feels just right. Character input is incredibly responsive. The movelists remain refreshingly tiny and put the emphasis of mastery immediately on the fundamentals rather than gating it behind encyclopedic memory of combos. The characters themselves are as varied and entertaining to experiment with as ever, even if their Story Modes are half-baked nonsense.

...a song as old as rhyme.

The shame, though, is that those utterly engaging characters and fundamentals are surrounded by a user-level experience that is anything but. The range of available modes borders on the pathetic. Not only are the 5-10 minute Story Mode “journeys” a joke both in terms of challenge and presentation, punctuated by what appears to be storyboard fan art and snippets of context-free dialogue from a badly translated 80s shonen anime, but SFV fails to provide even the basic Arcade Mode experience that has been the baseline way to introduce players to fighting game characters since time immemorial. Good luck if, like me, you’ve had only limited exposure to this series in the past two decades, because there’s no real tutorial either, and the game shows zero interest in helping players achieve basic competence beyond describing half the control scheme and throwing them to the wolves. Even the movelist menu is a pain in the ass to access and display, to the point that it’s easier and almost necessary to physically print out movelists when learning a character.

What the game lacks in story it makes up for in riveting dialogue.

SFV’s online multiplayer mode, arguably its raison d’etre, has much bigger problems than the game’s general barriers to entry and lack of solo content. While the netcode runs smoothly enough and players are thankfully given the option to limit matchmaking to opponents with high-quality network connections, the amount of time wasted between matches is downright stupefying. It’s probably unavoidable (and very forgivable) that matchmaking itself can take a few moments. What’s not forgivable is the interminable wait between successfully finding a match and actually getting down to fighting. Between loading times and unskippable musical interludes (probably masking more loading times), players are forced to spend just as much time staring at a motionless screen as they are actually playing the game - and significantly more if your opponent leaves after the first bout. These kind of intermediate pauses might be no big deal in games with 30-60 minute match times like Dota, or a minor inconvenience in 10-20 minute round shooters, but in a game whose matches can end in seconds they are pace-killing and frequently just shy of infuriating. 

Consequently, the sum of what might be a technically perfect fighting game is ruined by a functional inadequacy that actively prevents the player from experiencing that perfection. By my own stopwatch timing, I spent as much as five minutes twiddling my thumbs in a session for every one minute spent actually playing Street Fighter V. It is, in short, a tedious and mood-breaking way to engage with any fighting game, however strong its underlying combat. That this seems to be inherent to limitations of the engine is all the more shame, as it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Capcom will ever find a way to patch the problem out of existence. For someone interested only in local matches with enough Street Fighter-playing friends willing to power past the loading frustrations, the failure of SFV’s overall package and online play might be forgivable. For me, it’s a losing proposition whatever way you look at it.

Dark Souls 3, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Praise the Sun

Game: Dark Souls III
From Software, 2016 (PC version reviewed)

Dark Souls 3 is Dark Souls 2 at heart. Not the Dark Souls 2 that actually exists, mind you - a great game but flawed sequel in many of the ways it parted from its predecessor - but the Dark Souls 2 that might have been had it recaptured the essence of the first and built directly upon its successes. Sometimes it does a bit too much recapturing and a bit too little building, sure. But it gets the balance right where it matters most, and it’s tough to imagine any fan of the series coming away disappointed with its conclusion.

DS3 isn’t shy about its sequel status; in fact it’s constantly celebrating it. From the moment the familiar title screen appears and the music begins, the game revels in its place in the trilogy. Where the first Dark Souls featured only quiet, cut by the harsh slashing noise of the player pressing “any button to continue,” and the second introduced a soft, pensive chorus, DS3 bursts into a full-blown choral requiem not-so-subtly indebted to Mozart’s. It’s a fitting crescendo for a game that is in every way aware of its derivative nature as a sequel while simultaneously being determined to take those familiar elements and push them to their extremes. 

Hello, old frenemies.

The very first boss epitomizes this, a beautiful little fight combining elements of DS1’s Artorias battle with a very Bloodborne-esque transformation phase. It’s hard to think of a more exciting way to welcome veteran players to this new yet familiar chapter while teaching newcomers the core principles of the series, its combat, and it’s themes. On that front, the developers took criticisms of the infamous Souls obtuseness to heart and deigned to supply in the new Firelink Shrine the most helpful and accessible tutorials of the series. The game is probably still opaque as hell to first timers, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice to see From Software making some basic concessions to mechanical guidance while still leaving plenty of room for discovery where more advanced aspects of DS3’s systems are concerned. 

Bloodborne’s grandiose Gothic architecture returns in spades.

Not all the changes are for the better. It’s hard not to be disappointed that DS3’s Firelink Shrine has reverted to the abstract teleportation hub that is the Nexus of Demon’s Souls, rather than DS1’s central axis from which the surrounding world is unlocked like a puzzle box. But while large stretches of DS3 at first seem to unravel in a fairly linear fashion after Firelink, it quickly becomes apparent that the world is as massive and full of alternative routes and secret paths as DS1, if not more so . The areas are gorgeously crafted, each evoking memories of prior Souls entries or Bloodborne while building something entirely new on those memories. The introductory High Wall of Lothric and the Undead Settlement, for example, while instantly reminiscent of the Undead Burg, turn out to have much more in common with Bloodborne’s terrifyingly hostile Central Yharnam. Rather than the staid, largely passive undead guardians of DS1, these areas are full of frenzied religious mobs, packs of hounds, and nightmare creatures that burst from the shadows, all pushing the player toward Bloodborne’s much faster pace of combat and crowd control skills than DS1’s “Try luring them out one at a time” duel-like approach to encounters. These areas are still meticulously designed puzzles to be unlocked through careful exploration, creativity, and plain old trial and error, but the frenetic new pace and variety of enemies succeed in injecting Bloodborne’s excited fear into the proceedings in a way that DS2’s tedious clusters of identical sword-wielding humanoids so frequently failed to do.

For all the allure of Fashion Souls you might be surprised to see half the player base running around dressed as Raggedy Kylo Ren.

The nods to previous From Software titles can feel overbearing to the point of fan service at first. My emotions at rediscovering old allies and locales peaked in the first hour and almost immediately ebbed after that when I started to worry DS3 was content to be the sequel that rehashes the best moments of its predecessors, then calls it a day. That worry didn’t last long. Without spoiling anything specific, the frequent throwbacks and nods to history do turn out to serve an important thematic purpose that pays off big dividends in the second half of the game, when I was surprised to find myself affected and even disturbed by the places DS3 proves willing to go to both to fulfill and to subvert the themes established by the series. I know this spoiler-aversion makes for a horribly vague way to discuss story, and I’m aware that the effectiveness of these narrative moments is often limited to those who have obsessively explored previous Souls worlds and their surrounding lore,* but all I can say is that I found them deeply satisfying and as appropriate a conclusion to the trilogy as I could have hoped for. 

DS3’s bosses come in all shapes and sizes, but the biggest and baddest are the biggest and baddest of any Souls yet.

Even sixty hours and one ending in, it’s too early for me to speculate where the game stands among the From titles. The full potential of these games isn’t always apparent on a first playthrough or before having had some time to reflect on and live with the experience. Some initial disappointment aside, I had a blast with my first DS2 encounter, and it wasn’t until revisiting DS1 and returning to DS2 that I realized how much less satisfied I was with it as a Souls game, and how much less interested I was in plumbing the depths of its world than I was with its predecessor and Demon’s Souls. But I can confidently say some superlative things about DS3. The bosses are beautiful, hulking creations that prove a thrill to discover and a joy to master, providing challenges to match the most memorable fights in the series. More than in any previous Souls game I found myself not wanting to move past a given area until I had engaged in jolly cooperation with other players dozens of times, learning the ins and outs of these titans and vicariously re-experiencing the pleasure of besting them. A friend I recently introduced to the series pointed out that some of these battles reminded him as much of Shadow of the Colossus as they did of DS1, and I can think of no better compliment to From than that they have succeeded in wedding the titanic scale and puzzle-like design of those creatures with the intense combat intricacies of Souls, accompanied by the simultaneously most sweeping and most personal orchestrations Yuka Kitamura and Motoi Sakuraba have yet composed for the series.

Papers could and have been written on the From design philosophy and what makes their worlds tick so distinctively. We can point to numerous core elements and speculate to what extent they’re the “secret sauce” imparting that unmistakable Souls flavor no one else has yet managed to imitate. The brutality of the combat and the careful precision it demands. The unique sense of accomplishment that comes from mastering something so challenging and precise. The mystery of an ancient world largely uninterested in the player character or in giving away its secrets. The thrill of putting together the pieces of those secrets and beginning to discern patterns in the dream-like chaos. The visual design that is equal parts familiar and alien, historically gothic yet otherworldly in its proportions and inhabitants.

You won’t want for excuses to stop and take in the view...

Maybe it’s some of those things; maybe it’s the careful combination of them. I haven’t even touched upon the multiplayer component that, PVE and PVP alike, is so singular to this series in the ways in which it seamlessly integrates with the “solo” game experience, now expanded and perhaps even perfected in DS3. I certainly haven’t spent the time I should have complaining about the state of the PC port, which a month after its initial Japanese release remains as plagued by network bugs and online instabilities as on day one. 

...buut you’ll be taking in this slightly less welcome view quite a lot as well.

But I could talk about one or another aspect for this game for pages and still have volumes to write,** so on some level this review was always going to be a half-assed summary. I haven’t made any secret that Dark Souls was my favorite game of its generation - and maybe ever - so maybe it’s enough  to say Dark Souls 3 is the sequel I always thought it deserved. If last year’s Bloodborne wasn’t evidence enough of the difference it makes to have Hidetaka Miyazaki at the helm, this should be plenty for anyone. It may not be as exciting to see the director retread familiar ground as it was to see him build an entirely new world, but it’s remarkably fulfilling to experience the way he puts an end to the old. 

* A not-small percentage of the Souls fan base, to be fair.

** And hopefully will, one of these days.