takunomi-blog/posts/Queen's Blood.html

<p><p><figure><img src="/images/2024-12-23/a.png"></br></img></figure>
<time datetime="2024-12-23">2024-12-23</time></p>

<p>I'm currently reading a book and I want to call it my game of the year. I'm not done with it, and it's just a book, but I'm starting to see the contours of an interactivity and level of choice that exists in certain works of all media, and it is usually only utilized inadvertently. What are we really playing if we already know the result of our every action? Sometimes it's the expansiveness and clarity of depth and possibilities. What <em>Queen's Blood</em> and its million billion minigames does is walk down all of these roads and tag you along. It's the diametrical opposite of letting your mind do work. I haven't finished that book yet, and it's a book, and I don't quite yet know if what I'm talking about makes sense, so let's settle with a video game for game of the year.</p>

<p>Some 90 hours into <em>Queen's Blood</em> I realize I should probably have played <em>UFO 50</em> instead. It wasn't a waste of time, and I've thoroughly enjoyed 85 of those aforementioned hours. It just seems that of the 50 minigames in <em>Queen's Blood</em> and the 50 over there, I might have come closer to engaging with real auteurs on the other side. Not conclusively though. <em>Queen's Blood</em> is the game of the year of the year 2024 in a manner closer to truth than to reality. In <em>UFO 50</em> exists a game called Magic Garden, and it's the rightful game of the year of the year 1984 and of the year 2024, but since it's just the dream of 1984, and because I only played it for ten minutes, you get to enjoy this writing about <em>Queen's Blood</em> instead.</p>

<p>The variety, depth, ridiculousness, earnesty, quality, and utter disregard for a company's finances, tells me that Real Humans made this Anthology of All Things Cool If You Are Thirteen Years Old. When an evil corporation makes a game with the story of rebels murderizing an evil corporation, certain people on multiple levels of influence, must be ARTISTS (more on that later). Nature finds a way even in the concrete jungle of Shibuya or wherever the fuck they made this. Perhaps I should have played the organically homegrown, handmade, bespoke, independently developed game, partly made by the re:father of the roguelike genre, but dammit, I love spiky-haired dudes with bad ass swords, and martial arts ladies in short leather skirts, and I'm not afraid to admit it.</p>

<p>Not to anthropomorphize a company, but that level in <em>We ❤ ️Katamari</em> where you roll up the entire universe casts you as the creator of just one of Square Enix' cojones. To spent more than a hundred million dollars creating such a lush tactical deck-building card game, and Kirby's-Dream-Buffet'ing it with a bunch of other expansive minigames like a racing game, a nonsense story and a team-based fighting game, while putting some hot anime ikemen on the cover and not even writing the title. THAT'S 金玉.</p>

<p>It's been sixty thousand years since they did the same thing and rammed the entire Pokemon TCG onto a Gameboy cartridge. You'd see beautiful low-res renditions of real-life cards, walk around a digital universe to gather more, and then compose a deck to combat digital opponents. <em>Queen's Blood</em> is pretty much the same. Instead of the overly wrought menu-based hub you see in digital TCGs like <em>Runeterra</em> and <em>Marvel Snap</em>, there's this incredible 3D world to explore, where individual areas sometimes act like dungeons unto themselves. I especially liked the mushroom jungle, where even understanding the geometry was a challenge. Again, we return to the guts of a company doing this. I spent hours with this stuff before unlocking another match in the main game. I didn't mind. It's a premium package.</p>

<p><em>Queen's Blood</em> falls in the vein of <em>Tetra Master</em> and <em>Joustus</em>, where the deck you're building tries to control a grid-based board. Instead of chipping away at the opponents health pool or gathering victory points through sub-mechanics, each played card has a value that gets locked to one of three lanes it's placed in. Whoever has the most points in a lane, takes it all. Card-specific mechanics like upgrading, reacting, attacking and so on, were drip-feedingly added over the 60-70 hours I spent with this game.</p>

<p>I wouldn't dare call <em>Queen's Blood</em> simple, what with it being both a card game and a board game, yet in execution you're JUST placing cards on a grid, like an MMA competitive tarot game. And it feels monstrously good. No loading, no random boxes to pay real money for, no timers: just instant card battles, with incredibly snappy input and response. It's the sort of game from an alternative future I imagined, where the button-based input of game controls had triumphed over the touch-screen controls of smartphones. We'd get progressively more impressive gameboy-style pick-up-n-play experiences, but the game design would be well-conceived. Well, we got this.</p>

<p>DeNA released a beautiful freakazoid version of the Pokemon TCG a few weeks ago, and all I could think was nooooo. Do like this: take the <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> engine. Cram that card game into it and sell it for 60 dollars. Imagine scaling an enormous mountain in Zelda to find a hermit on the peak who challenges you to a pokemon card duel.</p>

<p>Should this game have multiplayer? Definitely. Can you brute force your way through retries? It seems so. Still, it's a gorgeous, responsive, intuitive and ingenious game. I appreciate the enormous real-time battle mode they included as well. You control a team of mechanically diverse characters that you can continue to specialise and customise through a whole other mini game where you play around with this magical spreadsheet of growing, living rock candy. It even manages to almost avoid the "subsystems for the sake of subsystems" issue I've been raging about in previous posts. The individual characters have unique interesting roles that work to complement each other. The spunky girl can be both a supporter and a healer. She creates fields to augment the other characters, and gets bonuses to her healing prowess, while the bird-looking main boy is both a defender and a bring-the-hurt kinda guy. Oh, and since you'll be juggling this stuff for a good while between the real battles, know that it is encouraged to mix and match the many weird and occasionally very HOT team members. Try the ninja teen and lion combo! Or the teddy bear cat + priestess.</p>

<p>This was fun, but I'll drop the gimmick and address the real game a little. I mean I AM saying <em>Queen's Blood</em> is my game-of-the-year, but we know the real game is the 3d action game with a ridiculous story. The developers have gotta be thinking the same thing we are, at this point: Why are we here? Why are we doing this? The first part of this remake trilogy was surmountable because it was just Midgar. I couldn't really comprehend how they would translate the hodgepodge of random backgrounds from the original game, to a Playstation 5 triple-a game. Turns out, they just went all out and created everything to the scale needed not to look or feel plain and dinky. The result is a game that just isn't sustainable. Not financially, creatively, or recreationally. As mentioned, I enjoyed almost all my time spent with the game. It's just difficult to understand why the effort is put into recreating this 1997 game. It's a wonderful narrative (my favorite in the series), but games are inherently repetitive, and though the financial part might make sense if this game makes a billion dollars, and creatively it seems to make sense when the developers appear to just go bonkers on every single aspect, it's the recreational part, the "what am I gaining from playing so much of this" that stops making sense. Lots of games hit this wall, but when you've committed to making a trilogy of this size, the issue is so much more apparent, and there isn't a precedent for what happens when you recreate and explode the original. Maybe just take a page out of Valve's book and just... stop at 2? This might be a person who is too old to play this stuff talking, but it doesn't seem like triple A video games in the traditional PlayStation style can go above this. Just for a moment, I'll iterate some triple A genres: Shambling Corpse of Ambition (<em>Cyberpunk 2077</em>), Wannabe Auteur's Total Disregard for Other People (<em>The Last of Us Part 2</em>), What the Committee Wanted (<em>God of War Ragnarok</em>), and This is What You Asked For, No, Not Like This, Yes, Exactly Like This (This game). Is there a reason to make sequels to any of these games? Or games in the same genre? You can't outdo them financially (well, you CAN, but... WHY?), and none of the stories are THAT good. This basically philosophising on the "are games art" question. I want to say that no one would call any of these games art, but English is a language for dweebs and so a lot of people equate art assets with art. In that sense, these games are the most art, because they have the most assets. Clearly they are not art. They are better blockbuster works than the grandest Hollywood blockbusters of the last twenty years, and that's about it. I really should have played <em>UFO 50</em> or <em>Unicorn Overlord</em> instead. Maybe I should stop playing video games entirely. What's even left in this medium, for a person who doesn't give a shit about Twine games?</p>

<p><em>Queen's Blood</em> has 30 fights, 29 of them being interesting. It crescendos to a crescendo that kinda sucks, both narratively and mechanically. Alas, that is not unlike a lot of big experiences. It'll be 3-4 years before we see a sequel to <em>Queen's Blood</em>, or one of its minigames, meaning we might not ever see a sequel to <em>Queen's Blood</em>, but we'll definitely see a conclusion to that mini game about the japanimation people killing a fourteen year old girl's idea of a hot guy.</p>