There's no game I desperately want to like more, but smalltime Japanese strategy RPG developer Sting caught my interest with Atlus USA-published Riviera: The Promised Land and Yggdra Union: We'll Never Fight Alone - a time when Sting really liked subtitles, apparently.
Both games are more annoying than they need to be and absolutely, one-hundred percent require guides for a player interested in finding everything the games have to offer, which is bullshit for games that are exclusively portable, meant to be played away from where you easily access such things, but they were both interesting, unique, and more importantly, playable enough that the stupid auteur nonsense wasn't a huge detriment. Both bring something interesting and unique to the genre that's for their own good; Riviera is disguised as a standard Japanese RPG, but the combat is more strategic and entertaining than expected, and Yggdra Union is almost a hybrid between turn-based strategy, where movement is planned, and real-time strategy, where the actual battles take place.
Sting's latest two offerings, Knights in the Nightmare and Gungnir, are a different story, however. Both are so obnoxiously annoying and restrictive to play for the most part, blatantly flipping off the most basic of conveniences and good sense in game design, that they're hampered by their own pretentiousness rather than enhanced by it at all. I want to like them both a lot more than I do - they're both ambitious, well-presented, and have great soundtracks - but they do so many things wrong that a developer that's been around for a decade has no business doing, that I can't bring myself to appreciate them as much as I want to; bad game design is bad game design. And even while Gungnir is more playable and not as irritating as Knights, it's barely half-finished, with a bafflingly-short length despite having tons of reused maps, sprites, and tracks.
I was willing to consider Knights a case of tripping over one's own shoelaces, and every good developer is allowed a miscue, but Gungnir was one of the very few games I've bought without doing any research whatsoever ever on it. I was that willing to love it. But now it seems like Riviera and Yggdra Union were accidents, not the groundwork of a future great developer, making the only thing consistently enjoyable about them their soundtracks. They've been around long enough to know better at this point.
