Arc 4384 - The Double-Edged Sword
Rating: **
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Crey's latest experiments unleash a powerful force on Paragon City. I won't say much more, but there's at least one plot twist.
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So, okay, let me be honest, I'm not holding my breath. The outline doesn't look great, it's about Crey, which isn't a super-duper inspiring group in the 40+ game - for what it's worth, guys, there's already an arc in the 40-44 range where Crey is shut down. I honestly feel that Crey are a bit played out as a villain group. Am I gunna judge harshly? Oh, I dunno. But I do find Crey's turning into a one-enemy group in the 40+ game is tedious.
As I sit up and get ready for this review, it's with a new reviewing tool - Snowblasted, a level 41 Ice/Energy blaster. He's freshly respecced and freshly dolled up with common IOs. No - well, almost no - set IOs, no clear plan on a set. He's got maybe a bit of bonus accuracy and no bonus recharge. Part of why I'm doing this arc - I want him to get three sets of Entropic Chaoses and four Crushing Impacts. Fun fun fun, eh kids?
Presentation - the arc uses title text decently, and the contact is Mynx. Now, this is a lucky one. Mynx hasn't said a single word to me in my entier time in this game. So she has no clear sense of character or character voice, and since I haven't read the comic with her in it. Therefore, there's no character voice to play against. There's something I appreciate there - I'd like it more if the contact was someone who was established in the game, and written well and someone I'd like to deal with. Since the level of writing the Mission Architect produces tends to go towards the 'amateur' in the rather unpleasant sense of the word, I'd rather a non-obnoxious cardboard cutout than yet a bad fanfic rendition of a character I actually liked.
This, incidentally, is a bad, bad thing, MA. My standards are low enough that I'll accept 'bad' writing, or 'uninspiring' writing, because the apparent alternative is 'worse' writing. This is a bad false dichotomy to set up in one's own mind, but it's one MA has me seeing. Mynx has a voice that seems... unremarkable. She could have been one of the Detective contacts, and given the level range of this arc seems prety high, it's kinda odd that a member of the Vindicators herself is asking me to do something inspecting-based.
Mynx wavers between a military sort to a lighthearted discoverer... I got no clear feeling of herself from it. It not only failed to tap an existing character voice, it also failed to render her as any kind of character at all. If she pulled her face off at the end of the mask and proclaimed she was actually Zordon all along I'd probably believe her, because there's so little here to feel out as a character. It's all technically correct writing that carries no character within that technical correctness.
"Cut the crap," and "Abandon your loquacity," are both technically correct ways to say the same thing and yet they both come out of two very different mouths. As it stands, Mission Architect more and more makes me feel like I'm watching a Joss Whedon show where character voice is a matter of whose turn it is to play the badass.
The intro/outro text for the mission was quite nice to start with but rapidly felt like it was being filled in like homework - as if the author was reluctant to simply not have any text of that ilk. There's some lore issues, but I fear they might be my memory of the lore, so skip them if you don't care:
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This is just my memory of the game lore speaking, and I'll happily take contradiction here. The lore as I remember it is that Countess Crey is locked up as of around level 44, meaning that all their operations after that point are either based in the Rogue Isles, and therefore illegal in the United States, or rapidly shutting down hidden labs in the United States.
In either case, there is no need to be stealthy. You are dealing with wanted criminals and monsters. Slam them, shut them down and send in the longbow troopers. Seize the records. The tone of such interactions with Crey should be exactly that. You are not dealing with a legitimate business front any more. You haven't been for ten levels.
I therefore found the flavour of the affair somewhat in asking. Sneaking around, checking for contraband... the mere fact it's a Crey vessel at all should get the ship seized. This is work for the police. If I'm being assigned this work by Mynx, it should have some rationale for it... I have no idea why Mynx would be telling me to do this beyond the very simple argument that Crey are bad and we are good.
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There's a lot of space-filling. Return dialgoue is the worst - it's a place where the writer can put a lot of text for those people who want to read it, and yet it's all hastily done, click-to-get-to-the-bit-I-actually-wrote text. The collections were not, fortunately, arduous. There are lots of space-filling glowies, but while they fail to add anything to the tone or atmosphere, they do so in a way that at least doesn't detract. There are chances for symmetry, for development, and the author simply chooses not to take them.
When you have this kind of writing, what really stands out are nice touches. Things that make you smile. There's an NPC who's a physics joke in the third mission, and silly as it was, it made me smile. That's good. It broke me out of the somewhat unimpressed malaise. There's an NPC assistant, who when you leave him behind, reassures you that he can take care of himself so you don't need to worry. That is, yes, a nice touch.
So, with a build-up that would make a bran supplement seem striking, what of our conclusion? Unfortunately, it falls prey to the problem where the writer introduces a big threat, and provides the tools to dispose of that threat, without the protaganist being involved. I just led around the three av-class characters and let them mop up for me. I simply did not care enough, not even about the tickets, at that point. I was in this for the final briefing, hoping that maybe something will change and maybe I'd finish one of these bloody arcs for once and not quit out of boredom or disgust halfway through. So in the end, this arc wasn't bad enough to quit, but not exciting enough to finish. And when you do, and see the denoument, it's nothing special. There's an attempt to do pathos but it's like having a message crammed in the last two minutes of a cartoon.
So, to run down some things that I think are worth mentioning, the map choice is sensible, the custom NPCs non-irritating, the mission objectives reasonably clear and the level range consistant. That is to say, this arc at least turned up to class with its sports clothes and a full lunchbox, so even if I didn't particularly like playing with it, I can't dob it in to teacher and get it in trouble.
Am I too grouchy? Eh, who knows. This is a good arc for people to start with, and it's certainly a good arc for an author. As it is, it's simple, it's direct, and if I'd stumbled on this arc levelling through the game I'd chalk the writing errors up to a missing continuity editor, and just trundle through it. It's not bad, it's just unremarkable. And unlike many other unremarkable things, it is wise enough to not trumpet itself as the second bloody coming. We're not talking about Halo 2 here.
In one word: Unspectacular.
