I’m also not enjoying it much. I feel overwhelmed by the ability options (Bounce + Spark or Spark + Bounce?) because it seems like I can infrequently change them, and then in combat I’m not entirely sure what the difference is. I also feel overwhelmed by the setting, story and characters. But none of them are intriguing enough for me to want to figure them out. I don’t want to judge it too quickly, maybe it’ll start to cohere towards the end…
EDIT: You may find out things about the game by reading my post that some consider spoilers. I have made changes to not have that be the case but be forewarned: here I talk about the game and what it tells you. I mean, DRAGONS.
I just finished the game in normal mode and I have to say, I am polar opposite from Tom’s and others who find this game wanting. The thing I dislike most about it is its brevity; I really could have done with another couple of hours at least. I think that there is an opportunity for them to do DLC to add some additional areas to the game but even as it stands I am not unhappy with the short play length. It also starts abruptly and deliberately doesn’t give you any information for the longest while, which makes the culture/game/expectation shock even more stark.
It certainly was a sophomore effort, in that I think they deliberately went in a different direction into order to not overlap and in some cases arguably just to be different. That is Monday-morning it, though; I wonder how many of these decisions flowed instead from just how the game evolved. The very basic bones are there but buried so deep, its not obvious at all. It’s so different that I think some people are struggling against expectations, and other are struggling with the difference between the games’ genres. That’s not to exclude those who genuinely have issues with the mechanics and style; it would seem to be easier to have those issues when the game isn’t what one was expecting. Someone should make a Venn diagram around this.
By the end, I was completely comfortable with the turn() process, as well as much better at shaping the Functions to get what I wanted out of them. the enemies Tom seemingly referenced as annoying in the last act turned out to require some trial and reconfig but then were actually easier than some of the other earlier enemies for whom I didn’t deliberately tweak my loadout.
impressions that could be seen as spoilers
I was shocked that the game ended with a number of options unavailable; again, Supergiant made some bold choices here. Not revealing the full backstory, or what is really going on in full. I expected by the end of the story to understand what (and where) Cloudbank was; I didn’t. I expected to know much more about the complex antagonists; I didn’t. I expected that the mythos would be explained or at least be more understood; it wasn’t. Part of that I think comes from the desire to aid the replayability. I think in others, Greg K. was content to just allow the narrative mystery to remain. No one ever knows what is in the briefcase, and it really isn’t critical to the story or the player’s experience. You do get a general sense for what’s going on and there is a sense of closure/understanding by the end. Cloudbank is such a fantastic setting, though, I really lament not knowing more. The game had a such a strong “The Big O” meets Bioshock" feel to it.
If there is an area I think its more fair to compare Bastion and Transistor is in the narrative. Bastion had those amazing emotional moments: The people turned to dust; the stories about Caledonia, this city/civilization that has ceased to be; finding Zia in the garden; carrying Zulf past the Ura at the end. Any game is going to struggle to live up to those moments. I think that with Transistor, Supergiant didn’t even try to match that. The story about Cloudbank, the Camerata, and the story between Red and various people on her journey is touching but completely different in scale and tenor from Bastion’s, and that’s OK.
All in all, though, its a great game I really enjoyed.
Please mark your post is shock full of with spoilers, Rhinohelix?
That was a bit annoying to read.
I don’t think I spoiled anything more than any of the reviews I read but I made changes to potentially account for what you considered spoilers. Let me know if you still have issues with the post. Or did you mean I spoiled Bastion? Because I did talk about specific events in that game, as opposed to how much of the overall story is or isn’t laid out to the player in Transistor.
You’ve covered up the naughty bits according to me beautifully :-)
I finished the game last night, and I’m still not sure what I think overall. I actually like how it plays more than I liked Bastion; I agree that the combat suffers the this kind of punctuated do-everything/do-nothing pacing, but I think there was eventually (barely) enough incentive to avoid using Turn() that it ended up working out all right. I think combat as a whole might have made more sense being exclusively turn-based.
I did enjoy the way skills worked, though I agree with Tom that the menus around them were a bit clunky. (I thought it worked much better once I moved to a controller, but they could have been further streamlined.)
The artwork and music are outstanding.
My biggest gripe is…
A lot of Transistor spoilers
[spoiler] unfortunately the writing. I don’t ultimately like the story Bastion tells, but I very much like the way it tells it. The Bastion script, especially in its incidental narration, is so deliberate and economical and quasi-poetic that it remains a delight to experience.
The Transistor, on the other hand, feels like he is talking almost non-stop and almost never saying anything of interest in terms of content or structure. The exemplar of this for me, for whatever reason, is after a “surprising” map transition late in the game that causes the Transistor to make the throw-away comment, “Let’s never do that again.” It’s an empty remark that adds or reveals nothing. Where Tom at least feels like the Transistor is speaking to Red, I mostly just feel like the Transistor is talking to himself for most of the game.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that, at the end, the narrative turns out to be a love story. Evoking a relationship deep enough to justify the ending is a tall order, especially when you allow yourself (mostly) only dialogue from only one side of the romance. However, the Transistor is very pointedly treated as an unknown from the beginning, which results in the impression that Red has fallen in love with the Transistor over the course of a relatively short game. While there are some indications of a previous relationship, and it may just be part of the mystery, I just couldn’t buy the romantic angle and so the ending really didn’t work for me.
On the other hand, the true nature of Cloudbank and the Process continues to intrigue me and it may be enough to get me to play through the new game+.
I also have two petty gripes. First of all, the punctuation in the subtitling is atrocious. The script has plenty of questions, but the subtitles have few question marks. There are a lot of run-on sentences and omitted commas. This surprised me, as I think highly of Bastion’s use of language.
Second, the VA for the ultimate antagonist of the game sounds like Mike McRae doing his Ron Paul impression.
I also agree with Tom on the final boss battle. It’s an neat reversal, in theory, but the game’s mechanics aren’t suited to it. Unless I’m missing something, it’s really the least interesting fight in the game.
[/spoiler]
I’m only an hour-and-a-half in, so the following opinion definitely may change, but I doubt it considering where I’m coming from. This battle system seems to be an adjudicator of taste judging by the dissenting responses, as I’m in the camp finding it a lot more interesting in comparison to Bastion’s. I’ve got up to Sybil, and already I’m having fun seeing what style of fighting I like most. I’m trying-out a combination of Spark() with Crash() for the AOE vulnerability effect to open-up, Breach() with Mask() for a multi-target solution and potential extra damage, Jaunt() to keep safe while I’m re-charging, and Help() for that extra bit of mob control and safety. Looking forward to seeing all the different stuff I can do as I unlock more!
Edit: looked-up Tom Chick on youtube, was not disappointed at the only relevant return: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko1sklmOR9E
So I finished my first NG+/Recursion play-through. The game is definitely meant to be played through at least twice. I finished out the Function backstories, got all of the Limiters, etc. Its really amazing how much better the second play-through felt. Knowing the hows and the whys of the combat system make the first half of the game fly by. By the time I got to the end again, I was doing 2000+ dmg with 3xVoid/Crash/Masked backstab Culls.
I found the story much more clear on the 2nd playthrough as well. The whole game really came together for me in a big way this time. I suppose that the game/world/story would be easier to grab onto better with a traditional tutorial but having it work out this way really makes everything feel more earned because of having to work harder for it. I don’t know if that is deliberate or not but the cold start obviously isn’t doing anything for some folks; I read lots of divided opinions in various forums.
I may do a third playthrough to finish off achievements and challenges and, if nothing else, spend some more time in the world. I don’t know if I like/love it more than Bastion or Braid but it is certainly in the same class, in my opinion.
Transistor is oozing indecisiveness from every pore. It doesn’t know which story to tell, so it drops a few vague hints and lets the player imagine whatever he wants. It has no idea which combat skills would create interesting interactions, so it just throws everything it can think of on the canvas and lets the player design his own sets. Most of them are dramatically unbalanced, so let’s toss in some difficulty modifiers in as well. Turn-based or real-time? Can’t decide, let’s phone in a half-baked variant of each.
No wonder the reviews are mixed; everyone only sees the version of the game they want to see, literally. I suppose that does tie in with the overall theme on some level, but a theme can never redeem mechanical shortcomings.
I fall into Tom’s camp on this one. I have no idea why they decided to hide so much of the backstory of the functions by forcing people to use the functions in different manners, and at least up to the Highrise stage I was still not getting any of the story. I think they tried to get too smart on this one, or maybe I’m one of those red-neck hillbillies who don’t grok these cyberpunk themes so much. In any event, the combat still stands to be criticised for the awful stop-start pacing. Either make it action, or make it turn based. This kind of forced flee / pause gameplay is really irksome.
I don’t know what to think of it. I really liked the music, art and combat system but hiding the lore didn’t help my enjoyment. Also didn’t get any Steam Achievements after finishing it since I ran the 64-bit executable directly instead of figuring out how to get Steam to call it. Doh.
This just came out for iOS, $9.99. No idea how good a fit it is for the touch screen since I never got around to playing the PS4 version either.
Given the action gameplay I don’t imagine particularly well. But perhaps I am wrong, there is a semi turn based mode, so it could work.
Finished Transistor yesterday. For a while now I’ve wondered whether it’s possible for a game that I’ve not been getting on with to turn me around, because I don’t recall any game ever doing that; if I’ve not enjoyed the first quarter/third/half then I’ve not enjoyed the rest. Transistor has proven that it’s worth pushing through sometimes.
Early on there wasn’t much of a story to get a handle on or… hook to pull me in. It’s a very slow beginning (and middle). And as much as I like Logan Cunningham and Ashley Barrett’s voices, it just felt too familiar after Bastion. And god, neither of them stop, whether it’s more commentary from Logan or Ashley humming constantly during turn planning. It’s clear Supergiant were trying to mix things up but that’s tough with the same ‘pieces’ being played so prominently. I can handle the return of Zee and Korb’s gorgeous visuals and sound though. I love the mashed up Art Deco/Art Nouveau and Gustav Klimt aesthetic.
The combat in particular stuck out. For a long time, and I mean, for a good 8-10 hours of play, the stop and start nature of the combat–choreographing your moves, executing them, then running around avoiding enemies and hiding behind cover until your Turn() bar replenished–just killed any flow or momentum I had. The planning and chaining stuff together was fun, the running, hiding and waiting wasn’t.
Then, somewhere, around the last half/third of the game, the story started to pick up pace and the various threads started to weave together. We also got a couple of new voice actors to break up the Cunningham, one of which, the weirdly hypnotic Royce guy, had such a great performance behind him. The combat too, now rich with different ability combinations and ways of offsetting the downtime (or enhancing the real-time bits) between turns felt more alive.
I wasn’t sure about the dual Transistor duel at the end for a final boss fight, that seemed contrived, but it still worked, and the ending itself was great, which isn’t something I say about games often. The abilities menu remained clunky given how often you have to switch things around and the targeting/queuing was finicky at times too but, by the end, these feelings didn’t really hold much sway.
So, yeah, I enjoyed Transistor and I’m glad I stuck with it! I wouldn’t mind playing through it again now because you can’t really do everything the first time, even with all those limiters enabled. The story structure and delivery means there’s probably a lot more to pick up on a second time. I’ve heard several people say the songs fill in the backstory too. I probably ought to look into that.
Bastion I played through twice and did everything, all dreams, all deities/idols invoked, and I don’t remember that much about it now. I think Bastion’s a more crisp and assured game mechanically, but I think Transistor will stay with me longer. It’s definitely a slow burner that doesn’t benefit from rushing and skimming over the details and lore.
Heh, and Pyre released the other day. Looks very cool and I’m keen to pick it up.
Thanks for the write-up geggis. I didn’t read the spoilers, but the rest was very interesting.
I also felt this way about the combat:
But sadly I couldn’t push through very much. Maybe some day I’ll go back to it and try to play it despite not enjoying the combat. Still, playing a game for 8-10 hours where I don’t enjoy the combat sounds like torture to me. :)
Note that most things paired with Jaunt() will let them be used during Turn() recovery - although for me those were almost always the first things I lost. I usually tried to pair it with something fast like Ping(). I do remember trying to avoid using Turn() in the brief moments I wasn’t being overwhelmed, but if it wasn’t paired with Jaunt() the recovery speed was substantial. And not having Jaunt() makes it pretty hard to avoid enemies…although using Switch() to make all the enemies innocuous and running away worked sometimes.
I felt even worse than that about the combat. I got very bored of it, very quickly. The planning and chaining was just repetitive and cumbersome.
Adding to that that the pseudo-mysterious storytelling (basically, a darn long sentence whose verb you desperately wait to come up so you can make any fucking sense from it) felt cheap and pretentious, it is one game I ran away from, even faster than I did from Bastion.
I am already not a fan of movies setting themselves up for 2 hours for some supposedly rewarding payoffs, so when a videogame attempts to do that, I dislike it very much as well.
I’m very persistent with highly regarded games, especially shorter ones, just to see what all the fuss is about! Compared to my effort with Breath of the Wild, 8-10 hours is a drop in the ocean ;) As I said, I wasn’t expecting it to change my mind after so long; that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
I will say though, despite coming out of Transistor feeling positive about it I can certainly understand people’s criticisms of it. @Nezz’s sentiments closely reflected my own for a good while.
Edit: My point is if you’re 8 or so hours into the game you’re probably almost done (unless you spent a lot of it doing the challenges).
I should also point out that I had a big (couple of years) maybe a chapter or so from the end - if I’d known that I was almost done I probably would have just put in the last hour or so to see the ending. Steam said I only actually spent 8 hours in-game - it was both the right length (as in I’m glad it wasn’t longer) and possibly even too long for what it was - but also felt like huge chunks of it was just perusing unvoiced text and fighting the interface for slotting things. I loved the style of this and Bastion, but probably wanted like half the gameplay to instead/as well somehow tell story, and I have no idea how it would do so.
Yeah, I did as many challenges as I could with all the limiters I could enable. Couple that with me being very slow and thorough anyway and you’ve got a longer time spent in the earlier sections compared to most folk.