Plus, once I had completed the last expansion, Eye of the North, I found myself smitten with some of its newly introduced characters and races. There was a surprising amount of detail and nuance to the world’s history, with regions including some great eye candy, too. It’s this, along with the plot occasionally mixing things up, that helped make its tale otherwise palatable for me.Ĭoncept art of the Charr, one of the first foes you encountered in the gameĪs time went on and I played through the other expansions, though, I found myself starting to appreciate the lore and landscapes of Tyria. This helped it avoid falling too much into Tolkien-esque territory that often involved the overused orcs and elves trope. Yet it got originality points for integrating more unique fantasy elements – like the warmongering, feline Charr and human god pantheon – alongside more familiar ones. Now admittedly, Prophecies, GW’s first installment, didn’t have the best narrative, as I frequently found its dialogue cringy and quite a few of its characters shallow.
The fact that it didn’t have to pay a monthly subscription helped seal the deal running around a fantasy setting was just being a side aspect for me at the time. We both had an interest in video games, and I loved the idea of jumping in with her friends and family for some cooperative action as a Ranger (One of the main professions their party was missing, which I enjoyed).
#Crosscode a promise is a promise 5 npc location series#
I ended up getting into the original Guild Wars (GW) series over a decade ago, with it being recommended by an online role-playing friend of mine. Bear in mind there will be some SPOILERS. Then again, I enjoy reading a good fantasy story myself, too, so I thought I’d be nice to share just how I got into the series, and why its narrative has stuck with me so strongly. It’s ironic, too, because I largely focus on science fiction while GW2 is high-fantasy, yet elements from it commonly inspire parts of my world building. Yet at their core, both women have heart, capable of both empathy and ferocity when it matters.Ī while back, I briefly touched on how Guild Wars 2 (GW2) – a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) that I still play to this day – helps fuel my writing muse. She just wants to get paid and enjoy her life while Samus usually does her job more out of duty, with payment often being a bonus. In comparison with the latter’s quiet nature, Jenosa is witty, outgoing and expressive. So as you can imagine Jenosa isn’t just another video game character she’s very personal to me.ĭread has me revisiting Scurge because of how much she feels like a foil to Samus. It helped that it did a great job in characterizing her, along with the ending spurring my creative muse into overdrive afterwards. Mainly because I’ve spent over fifteen years writing, role-playing and developing her character in a loosely metroid-based scifi setting ever since I beat the game. However, it’s the character of Jenosa Arma that keeps me coming back to Scurge: Hive from time to time. Both deal with female bounty hunters in scifi armor confronting a deadly, alien pandemic, with both infectious antagonists providing me with fascinating details to dissect for weeks. This is partially because the game itself shares narrative similarities with that of Fusion while still being distinct in it’s own right. It’s blasphemous, I know, but as ironic as this is, the game and it’s protagonist, Jenosa Arma, holds a very special place in my Metroid fan heart.
Yet my anticipation for this game does have me replaying another Metroid-inspired game: a GBA sleeper gem known as Scurge: Hive. That and I already have a lot of games on my plate that I want to complete (So many of my long awaited titles launched around this time). I myself probably won’t get to Dread until the holidays simply because I want to spend time enjoying it and soaking in the lore details and aesthetics. So as you can imagine with launch neigh, plenty of folks are revisiting past entries and doing marathon runs for a nostalgia trip. It’s also said to be the end of a story arc and given the slick previews, it looks like there will be plenty of lore to dig into. More importantly, it finally continues Samus’s story, which had been left off at the end of Metroid Fusion, a game dear to me because it was the franchise entry point for me. It’s the first true entry into the franchise in almost two decades, with it thought to have been cancelled many years prior.