I want a public apology from Koei for Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage
 

And I want to see whoever decided to add the harbinger of death Quicktime Events put to death in as vicious and brutal a manner as possible. Fuck you guys.

Let me describe: You all know what a Quicktime Event is by now, yes? In fact, I was late to the game on that point, and had never seen any until Spiderman Web of Shadows. Anyway, Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage has Quicktime Events for finishing off its bosses, and while I hate QTEs, I was basically okay with it at first, because it kiiinda fits Kenshiro's style to do that, and even though some of them were a little tough, you never had to restart a boss fight for failing. Then I started exploring the game a bit more.

See, every level has seven "missions" to be found throughout it, so if you want to get the full experience, you explore the levels and find them. The problem shows up if you complete all seven of a level's missions. This changes your boss finishing QTE (although it might not happen before you beat the game once). Normally it's several rapid fired timed sequences of a few buttons each. A "Harbinger of Death" QTE is eight rapid fired timed sequences of eight buttons each, and you have around three seconds for each sequence. The buttons are randomized, so there's no memorizing a sequence. That's sixty four buttons in around twenty four seconds. You fail a lot.

They could have changed the boss, changed his pattern, raised his stats, added traps to the battlefield, or pretty much anything. All of these are things I would be totally okay with, but they went with this, probably because it meant not having to actually add anything new. The buttons you press have no effect on what is actually happening on screen except whether your succeed or fail. There's no bonus animation; there's nothing. Except an achievement. Fucking achievements. Achievements are the worst fucking things.

It's aggravating because it punishes you for playing the game. I don't give one shit about achievements or points, I just want to play all of my game. But in order to do that, I have to spend forty five minutes in the following loop: Fail QTE - dodge roll - jump kick - fail QTE - dodge roll - jump kick - fail QTE - dodge roll - jump kick - fail QTE.... and so on. That isn't gameplay. And you can't turn it off. Your only option to avoid it is literally to play less of the game.

What the fuck, guys? Like, Jesus Christ, what the fucking fuck? This is a pretty decent (though not GREAT) game otherwise, so why? So much power in modern consoles, and what you're producing has all the sophistication of a cup-in-ball game. I'm not kidding about that apology; I mean yeah okay, I'm pissed off right now because I just finished doing another one of these (only because I hadn't figured out what set them off yet), but this is downright shameful. Someone somewhere should feel bad about this. Why bother making big budget current-gen console games when you're going to make three quarters of the gameplay (took me about fifteen minutes to get through the level up to the point of the 45 minute QTE binge) Simon Says? You might as well just get into the casual game market at that point.

Anyway, I'm just blowing off steam, but fuck, I think I'm just gonna take a break from action games until QTEs go away. Yeah, this is a ridiculously extreme example, but they're stupid at the best of times.

Like the point of challenges - even petty, pointless challenges - should be to give you more playing to do, either by giving you more game to play, or giving you more than one thing to do in a play area. Are all the bullshit medals and suchlike in a Spiderman game 100% pointless? Pretty much, but collecting them gives me something to sling around the city for, which is the whole point.

And what blows my mind here is like, Ken's Rage actually HAS that, with all the little stage missions, so throwing this in just makes no damn sense at all. But the way they do it is like this is a reward for doing all that other stuff that was actually enjoyable. I can only see the sort of thinking that leads to this punitive bullshit as being a product of achievements. Just implemented in the most ridiculous, bullshit way possible.

http://images.memegenerator.net/inst...0x/9950330.jpg

Made over a weekend.

I'm... not sure what you're saying? It was a pretty big budget title with a couple years development time. That's percisely the reason there's just zero excuse for this shit.

This is the same company that pumps out the same game with minimal innovation, right?

Your apology will be in the form of Fist of the North Star Empires: Ken's Rage, another "big budget" title with "a couple years development time."

When's the last time Koei made a quality game? This is a serious question, I honestly can't remember.

See I was annoyed by the Resident Evil 4 QTEs and there were literally a fraction of them than this game you described. I seriously thought they were on their way out.