calapine

So over Chrimbly I replayed the three FF XIII games. I didn't particularly intend to, and indeed don't usually play multiple games from a series close together in case I get fatigued by the game style. But I enjoyed it, partly because the three games have quite different mechanics, partly because the overall story hangs together pretty well, but mainly that the ending feels genuinely satisfying when it took you 100 hours to get there (and that's playing super-efficiently!). At the end of Lightning Returns, the world is quiet; everything is winding down, people are awaiting the end, monsters have been dealt with (the game contains a fixed number of spawns for the majority of baddies and bonuses when you kill the Last Ones). Souls have been saved. The fixed overall time limit of thirteen(ish) days means you can get a couple of days at the end of just enjoying the various places, the music, the cycle of days and nights. Then you kill god lol.

So I thought I'd do the same with another series, and Infamous popped into my head. With three-and-a-half games (I skipped the vampire DLC), it's a reasonable quantity of gamery, though unlike XIII all the games are pretty similar. You divide your time between story missions that often unlock new superhuman abilities and clearing out bad guys from small regions at a time to make them more quiet (and thus achieving a similar effect to LR).

Infamous 1 is probably the one I enjoyed the most. The crisp premise and small cast is effective, though perhaps a little too crisp - quite a lot happens off-screen and what turns out to be the actual plot is communicated via a series of optional dead drops. But the side missions are varied and mostly fun, and while the story missions vary, the whole thing doesn't feel like it's outstaying its welcome. The main downside is cosmetic - the three main areas of Empire City are quite similar and the whole place has a rather grey, dour look to it. Character models are basic and animation is janky. Perhaps the weakest aspect overall is the karma system, in which you decide whether to be a superhero or supervillain. The problem with this element is that you don't have much choice but to choose either evil or good at the start and stick to it, and the gameplay itself doesn't differ that much either way (though you don't have to worry about civilian deaths if you choose evil!). It's odd that two of the three sequels kept the system.

Infamous 2 is longer, involves its characters more and is a much prettier game overall. It's perhaps the most engrossing of the games, thanks partly to the introduction of conduits other than Cole; you can't play as them, but they do assist in various missions. One is obviously the "good" companion and one the "evil" companion, though there is a nice twist towards the end that makes it less crude than that. New Marais is a more varied city, too: there's a gasworks, an abandoned train yard, and most interesting of all (given that Cole is the Electric Man), a flooded shanty town. It's in many ways the perfect sequel, taking the things that worked and building on them, but it's also a rather long-winded and laborious game. Mini-bosses that take a while to put down early on still take a while later, because while the series is a quasi-RPG, you tend to unlock new moves as you go rather than improve your own strength or fire power that much. Nice ending though - the "good" one involves all conduits being sacrificed for the greater good. A neat way to end Cole's story.

So WHY was there a third game? We open apparently seven years into a government round-up of conduits. The earlier mythology is kept at arms length (though there is an electrics store apparently owned by Cole!). We follow new guy Delsin Rowe, who is a bit annoying at times; but overall the characterisation is decent: we meet other conduits who play a strong role, including the main villainess of the piece who is believable as someone who thinks she's doing the right thing.

The story shifts to real-life Seattle and the first big fight is on top of the Space Needle! Overall gameplay is similar, but enemies are very bullet-spongy and side missions are a lot more repetitive. The boss fights are also tedious - one particular fight you work through three times in total. It's not a bad game - especially on the PS5, with its higher frame rate - but it should perhaps have distinguished itself a little more. The main new idea - that you can steal powers from other conduits as you touch them - doesn't work quite as well as it might, partly because the movesets don't differ that much, and because you don't always have a lot of time to get used to them - most egregiously of all, the final boss can only be defeated by stealing her power, so you must take her down with moves you haven't used before (and can't level up, if you haven't saved up some juice with which to do so).

Finally, First Light, an origin story of sorts for supporting conduit Fetch. It's digital only and about half the size of the previous two games, though not much shorter than the first one if you include the various built-in Ratchet-and-Clank style challenge arenas. It's back to crispness - the story involves getting involved in a turf war between drug dealers, and while it tilts into "drugs are bad mkay" occasionally, it has a raw edge that the previous game lacked. We're back to only one moveset, and neon is perhaps the most visually pleasing one (and zipping around half of Seattle in one continuous streak is very cool). The actual story unfolds as flashback, interspersed with the arena challenges in a way that feel satisfying and fair, so while it's not reinventing the wheel it does have a freshness to it that appeals.

And that's all she wrote. While one could argue that the games are all similar enough that perhaps they ran out of ideas, I do think it's high time we met some new conduits. While playing through the whole series in a little over a week and a half was fun, it didn't hang together as well as XIII.

A final note - while I knew they were similar, I didn't realise just how much Forspoken stole from this series - many of the moves are virtually identical! I do think, though, that the sheer scale of Forspoken suits the game style more. While the Infamous areas vary somewhat - particularly in 2 - they're all a little samey: you don't really get the vast plains, mountains, deep caverns, forests, rivers of Forspoken. At the very end of the series, Fetch briefly gets out of town for a linear Tomb Raideresque few minutes, but it's too little too late. The heavy urbanness of the series is something of a trademark, but also something that all blends together in the mind, with few particularly distinctive parts. (Even the Space Needle is only one of a handful of tall towers you have to climb.)

So yes, a good series, one that deserves another entry, but one that never quite got everything right in a single game.