It was a long weekend in the US, so the Waypoint Crew has come back with plenty of games to chew on. Patrick has the less-than-thrilling Darksiders III, FromSoft's new VR game Déraciné, and Swery's queer-themed platformer The Missing to discuss, as does Austin. Austin finally beat Battletech, but he's certainly not done with the game. And Danielle has a delightful Frog Detective game and some hands-on time in Hitman 2 to bring to the table.
I’m surprised Patrick didn’t mention the huge Dark Souls influence on this new Darksiders, since it was a really blatant point of inspiration. I left the studio ages ago, but working on the game was an absolute drag, and it was clear that the leadership were resting on their laurels here.
There were talented people on that team, but they weren’t the ones making the big decisions. Also, no, it doesn’t get better. I’m shocked the reviews have been as generous as they were.
I’m not even done the podcast yet but I think you all might be interested: déraciné is (like you said a couple of times already) pronounced day-rass-ee-nay. The é in French is pretty much always like “ay”, and “dé” at the beginning of the word is unstressed – so you could say it more like “(day) rass-ee-nay” – the day part is quieter, the same way you say it in “delete” or “destroy”.
It has an English equivalent, deracinate, but it just means “uproot” (“un-root”, literally). It’s the normal everyday word for uproot in French. You’d use it in a sentence like “I have to go uproot some weeds”. Both the English and French words are used to mean uprooting plants, but also uprooting in the sense of being torn away from your natural location or culture, or to have a cultural uniqueness removed from something, or even to have your own culture or identity forcibly erased. The “racine” part of the word is not from the same root as “race”, but some people use the word as if it is.
“Déraciné” has all sorts of metaphorical connotations but the most interesting one to me in the context of a game from a Japanese publisher is the meaning of removing specific cultural identifiers, because it makes me think about “mukokuseki”, the Japanese word for “stateless”, a term used by Koichi Iwabuchi, a Japanese sociologist, to describe the typical design of Japanese products, and then later applied to anime characters (e.g. wild colours of hair and eyes, invented clothes, etc) meant to describe them as though they are coming from no culture in particular.
I don’t know if this actually makes the game any better.
FYI Patrick, the caffeine content of colas is actually much less than coffee. If coffee’s not cutting it, your only options are pretty much caffeine pills or possibly certain energy drinks (although a lot of them have less caffeine than coffee).
I heard Austin in the podcast was interested into an interview with SWERY exploring the themes of The Missing, I REALLY recommend he reads this interview:
I loved the game FYI but it brings an important perspective, IMO
I was just about to post this! I would also like to add that Swery does address the portrayal of Thomas from Deadly Premonition in this since it was also brought up on the podcast.
I’m surprised that Patrick is a big fan of VR and yet mostly uses the dualshock for controls. I’ve gotten into VR recently with a Rift and the vast majority of games I’ve encountered use hand tracking for gameplay, usually for grabbing things or aiming guns and pulling back bows but sometimes just as cursors (not a big fan of that application though, feels as detached and floaty as the Wii remote). Also feels pretty nice when e.g. in Star Shelter you grab onto a wrecked satellite with one hand and use the other to strip the useful parts from it.
