Thursday, November 3, 2016

Massive Chalice - 6/20 hours

I don't know why, but I was expecting this game to have a plot. So far, I'm 150 years into the 300 year campaign and it's just been a series of random battles interspersed with the occasional building, research, and arranged marriage. I'm not sure how a story-driven version of the game would look, but I think it would have been nice if you could connect with your individual characters, or at the very least have their noble houses have some kind of persistent generational stereotype.

I think I'd have really enjoyed the alternate-universe inverted version of this game, where there are all sorts of mechanics for managing your heroes' personalities and matchmaking couples of various degrees of reluctance for the good of the kingdom, and the actually combat is perfunctory. Though maybe that game is already Crusader Kings II.

The odd thing I'm noticing about Massive Chalice is that unlike XCOM or Fire Emblem, I'm not fastidious about preserving my characters. I think the fact that they quickly die of old age is making me callous. I can't resist the mindset of "sacrificing this warrior for the sake of victory is the most expedient way to win, and it really doesn't matter because he'll just be dead in 30 or 40 years anyway." Maybe I wouldn't adapt to immortality as well as I always imagined. Maybe I'd be the sensitive tormented vampire for about one, two generations tops before I decided it wasn't worth it. Or maybe Massive Chalice simply doesn't give me a reason to care about the little guys.

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