First of all, we can ignore the drama of 1.13 vs Wildfire 6. While you can get the maps for 1.13 Jagged Alliance 2 gold gog modded install, the Wildfire 6 commercial release here has more additional options such as npcs in farm tiles, mined defense of sam sites and other installations, and generally more interesting AI for night missions and daylight flanking. I think it is worth collecting both at this time of 2023-2024. The new AIM npcs have been tweaked to be more tactically useful. While one might dislike the personalities, many of the "lost mercs" are actually at Merc, like hitman and scope. Since merc is very affordable or gamable, you can refuse to pay for a long time, this is good for new games where economy is tight. San Mona still has the slightly buggy mma fights of 5k per profit, 3 fights every 2-3 nights. Mercs are higher cost, but other mercs like ira now have ambi/auto weapons, one of the op builds an IMP/custom merc normally has to take. Dimitry has higher wisdom too, so he learns faster than maddog. I have 40 in game days. PIcking single day options for the higher end mercs. My suggestionhire shadow and others for their weapons, then take chitzena within a day. Miguel used to say take Drassen, so I understand the new VA. The tactics are the strong point. Night time flanks, the AI no longer runs to noises and lights. They refuse to go into the light. They hide more when outnumbered, but you can still do a distraction and pull their attention away. Very nice night ops gameplay. Arguably better than 1.13 AI. All in all, worth the 1-2 dollars or even 5. I love tactical fights btw. The scope rebalances are nice. Novice is very easy on the strategic side, but still akin to expert on the tactical side as others mentioned. THey are much more accurate, even the blue shirt/red shirt newbies. My militia is blue, the enemy should be red, come on red vs blue people! The blackshirts defend the same sites, challenging, but still killable on night ops.
The music, the lighting, the various foods you can craft, all create a very strange but fun experience in Aquaria. It is like a combination of a 2d platformer, with cooking/crafting/gathering, and exploring deeper/darker areas for story. Game mechanics wise it is also pretty varied, as the various modifications changes your powers. The game has skill mechanics attached to it as monsters attack in certain patterns. So you can dodge it if you pick up the patterns or use different buffs to counter them. It is kind of like a 2d open world simulator, where you start from a home, and it never disappears. You can always return to it, and the music is very nostalgic and peaceful, then turns ominious or dead quiet in the danger parts.
I played this game almost a decade ago if not longer. I remember that it had a gripping plot, mini games that felt integrated with the gameplay, and controls on the PC that was quite good for what I felt at the time was a console generated port. Matching colors in the minigame and then watching it play out differently, felt like branching plot, action thriller novel style. The plot I can still recall as something very similar to "Indigo children" and conspiracies put together. If the visual novel genre in West had taken off early back then, they would have had a lot more exposure and market penetration. However, their type of game was perhaps too advanced for the genre times of the West. Now Japanese visual novels are penetrating into Western markets, because of the difficulty of marketing these plot heavy "adventure" games with point click styles. Japan figured out how to do it by making cute adorable themes. Indigo goes full on into cinematic, watch a movie and read a sound novel style of games like "Wolf Amongst us". A sort of more action thematic setup of Sierra's old adventure games, with modern cgi graphics. This was quite strange if one recalls how old this game actually was. Sometimes Quantic, your vision is just too "prophetic" at times for the market genre to catch up. This game was perhaps 10 years too early for market exposure. I recommend it for those that want more exciting gameplay than reading a visual novel that is part movie, part novel, part audio book. I also recommend it for those that liked Deus Ex style conspiracies and well.. just normal conspiracy "truther" stuff about powers. It can also appeal to Legend of Kyrandia style gamers that liked point to click adventures such as Wadjet games latest UnAvowed.
As a result of the massive resources they apparently sank into making this game fully 3d... the story and even some of the audio of voice acting, suffered as a result. In order to build all these 3d models, time needed to be taken. But if you don't have proper 2d paintings and settings to provide to the voice actors, how are they going to do their job properly without an understanding of the plot, the characters, and how they interact in both story and narration, role and decisions... I won't comment on the narrative choice as I disliked it but believe in creative freedom. Maybe some of the readers in this audience prefers this type of narration and it indeed has some positives. It is like reading an epic fantasy novel with 3 main characters but unlike Brandon Sanderson, there is no confidence that it all gets tied up together at the end. That is not the fault of the coders and developers but the ones managing the production. They decided where to put the resources and managed the production from right below the CEO level. The CEO also takes his fair share of direct action too. This wasn't a result of "not enough funding" or "not enough time", which is a common complaint and issue with game production companies. For newcomers or even just old legacy players from The Longest Journey... you might just be better off with Wadjet Eye games like Unavowed or Jap Visual Novels like Fault or Muv Luv. A 7 dollar sale price is worth money. The writers and creators, I had some interaction with but not much. I get the impression that they live inside a social, cultural, intellectual bubble of the tech giant culture. Which means they perhaps don't really understand why their audience may care very little for the fancy 3d graphics and lighting technology that the rest of their cultural bubble cares for. This also applies to other issues but that is less of an problem for this game. This game wasn't made by an American or Canadian company, in case people were wondering.
This is the second game in the series of a planned trilogy (about 3). Number 3 is slotted to be out in 2020 (This is Japan's version of indie groups). If you want to read the first one, that would be Fault Milestone One. Sighs, whoever did their title marketing was just... Japan usually has very long explanations as titles but this one was strange for me to grasp even though I understand some of the Japanese language quirks. That's not a problem with the text translation. Just something to keep in mind for newcomers to this "genre" of playing a pc game that is actually a movie, audio book, and novel in one. Expect to be in a theater, reading a book, listening to music and audio books at the same time, rather than the usual stereotypical PC action gameplay. It is a good experience, certainly far above spending 20 dollars at Chik fillet. And the 20 dollars was well spent in my view. You will get more than 4 hours but less than 10 hours of reading time by my estimation. Just enjoy the ride. P.S. One can interpret the title "Fault" to mean "Whose Fault it is". There is a bit of mystery to the plot for those that like mystery thrillers. This is comparable to the Western mystery thriller genre but not quite the same. I give it 5 stars not based on its length but its impact on my experience. Only issue I take with it is that they didn't have enough to slot the sequel in as the underwater quest should really have been included.
