Card-Based Marvel's Midnight Suns - Marvel universe card-based tactical RPG from Firaxis

[gurugeorge]

Or am I going to have to listen to embarrassing ass dialogue for the rest of the game, where every character is some form of Spiderman/Deadpool snark, and every other dialogue line is a clumsy ass attempt to shoehorn in a reference to the comics.

I for one just powered through it all by hammering the skip button and picking the conveniently highlighted dark side options. Even then it really bogs the game down though, you'll have to put up with it between every mission for a long while.

That's what I feared.

Second question then, is it worth it in the end?

The trouble is the advice to skip through doesn't always work because you get decent passive bonuses from building "friendshp" by talking to the various heroes, so if you want those you do have to pay a bit of attention now and then.

It does get a little bit better as the story goes on, the backstory has a kind of eldritch vast-time-spanning, famous-things-interlinking aspect to it that's quite comic-bookey, if you ever liked that aspect of comics, but it only ever reaches up to the level of being mildly interesting sometimes, and the friendship dialogues are mostly unbearably twee and only very occasionally tug at the heartstrings.

Again, really the problem is the taint of the "feel" of the MCU on the thing, which is really a kind of albatross around the neck of the game. (As I said in my first impressions above, I wisht it had the superhero characters written as they were in the last heyday of comic books, up to about the mid 80s and early 90s, say.)

Also it's quite annoying that you can't really have the absolute "classic" costumes (I believe there's a mod for the classic spidey outfit, but that's about it). It's all kevlar style shit from the movies, and variations on that theme.

 

[EtcEtcEtc]

Or am I going to have to listen to embarrassing ass dialogue for the rest of the game, where every character is some form of Spiderman/Deadpool snark, and every other dialogue line is a clumsy ass attempt to shoehorn in a reference to the comics.

I for one just powered through it all by hammering the skip button and picking the conveniently highlighted dark side options. Even then it really bogs the game down though, you'll have to put up with it between every mission for a long while.

That's what I feared.

Second question then, is it worth it in the end?

The trouble is the advice to skip through doesn't always work because you get decent passive bonuses from building "friendshp" by talking to the various heroes, so if you want those you do have to pay a bit of attention now and then.

It does get a little bit better as the story goes on, the backstory has a kind of eldritch vast-time-spanning, famous-things-interlinking aspect to it that's quite comic-bookey, if you ever liked that aspect of comics, but it only ever reaches up to the level of being mildly interesting sometimes, and the friendship dialogues are mostly unbearably twee and only very occasionally tug at the heartstrings.

Again, really the problem is the taint of the "feel" of the MCU on the thing, which is really a kind of albatross around the neck of the game. (As I said in my first impressions above, I wisht it had the superhero characters written as they were in the last heyday of comic books, up to about the mid 80s and early 90s, say.)

Also it's quite annoying that you can't really have the absolute "classic" costumes (I believe there's a mod for the classic spidey outfit, but that's about it). It's all kevlar style shit from the movies, and variations on that theme.

It's so bad. I've read way to many comics - specifically for Marvel pretty much every good run from the silver age till Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run. Not one of these characters acts like they should.

I wouldn't even say it's MCUified - it's just bad all around. The MCU at leasts understands that some characters don't need to be quippy shitheads. Black Panther wasn't making jokes about using social media. BLADE is on the facebook analogue and arguing about movie nights.

If every character is Spider-Man, what's the point of having Spider-Man.

 

[Grunker]

ignore the writing, enjoy the game

 

[mediocrepoet]

It's so bad. I've read way to many comics - specifically for Marvel pretty much every good run from the silver age till Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run. Not one of these characters acts like they should.

I wouldn't even say it's MCUified - it's just bad all around. The MCU at leasts understands that some characters don't need to be quippy shitheads. Black Panther wasn't making jokes about using social media. BLADE is on the facebook analogue and arguing about movie nights.

If every character is Spider-Man, what's the point of having Spider-Man.

Oh the story / social type stuff super sucks. Just click through that as much as possible. The game play is fun though and they should've leaned into that more, but why would they do that when it might actually produce something good?

 

[gurugeorge]

It's so bad. I've read way to many comics - specifically for Marvel pretty much every good run from the silver age till Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run. Not one of these characters acts like they should.

I wouldn't even say it's MCUified - it's just bad all around. The MCU at leasts understands that some characters don't need to be quippy shitheads. Black Panther wasn't making jokes about using social media. BLADE is on the facebook analogue and arguing about movie nights.

If every character is Spider-Man, what's the point of having Spider-Man.

Oh the story / social type stuff super sucks. Just click through that as much as possible. The game play is fun though and they should've leaned into that more, but why would they do that when it might actually produce something good?

I really don't think there's anything wrong with the general idea of having the story and exploration stuff, and technically it's well presented. And with some adjustment, the alternating rhythm between combat and story/exploration could have been refined and made smoother (to match the incredibly addictive analogous rhythm in the XCOM games). Even the basic idea beats of the story are ok.

The "ground plan" of the game is pretty solid.

It's just poor writing and characterization, that's all. As I say, it would have been great with more of a classic feel with the characters, with the feel of the characters those of us who loved comics grew up with and became collectors with, etc.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The thing that makes the story sections so confounding is they’re ripping off Persona. But for some reason instead of taking a thing that works and doing it themselves they tried to reinvent it somewhat and fucked up.

But yeah, it’s also incredibly badly written. I’m not exactly sure why, or how, but it seems someone at Marvel convenience a lot of top people that the direction Marvel stuff should be going is that absolute shit tier “comedy” the comics have been full of for like the last ten years. It’s been very weird to watch, because Marvel Comics is the least success branch of Marvel, and yet for the last several year Marvel has seemingly been using the terrible tone of current comics for video games and movies.

 

[Galdred]

There are mods that make character relations increase much faster and remove most of the part about collecting stuff in the garden. It really made this part more bearable.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

The game looks great, like all of the new Firaxis stuff, and the combat system is very well done. The random elements due to the card system keeps things interesting and prevent combat to degenerate into a repetition of the same moves. When I read about the card stuff I thought it would be shit, but it's actually working great and makes for excellent combat gameplay.
The writing is for teenagers, and the hole abbey part of the game where you socialize with your team is rather dull. They somehow failed to make any of these characters interesting, nor do they give proper introductions. I have no clue about comics and never heard about Magik, Nico, Ghost Rider Guy, Bloods, Lilith, Chton, and whatnot. Initially I thought those were made for the game, but it seems they have a comic history. The story telling is bad, but anyone that can suffer through the movies should be able to bear it. I do benefit from the fact that I have no clue about any of the characters, so I don't notice mischaracterizations and discrepancies with comics.

I am a bit surprised that this flopped commercially. The game appears to me that it should be the wet dream of any Marvel movie fan. I would have thought that they could have sold a solid amount of units based on that. Has the whole superhero movie buzz finally died off, or did the game get no advertisement?

 

[Lacrymas]

I am a bit surprised that this flopped commercially. The game appears to me that it should be the wet dream of any Marvel movie fan. I would have thought that they could have sold a solid amount of units based on that. Has the whole superhero movie buzz finally died off, or did the game get no advertisement?

Both imo. It being a turn-based card game also didn't do it any favors with the mainstream Marvel fans.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

I am a bit surprised that this flopped commercially. The game appears to me that it should be the wet dream of any Marvel movie fan. I would have thought that they could have sold a solid amount of units based on that. Has the whole superhero movie buzz finally died off, or did the game get no advertisement?

Both imo. It being a turn-based card game also didn't do it any favors with the mainstream Marvel fans.

I get that the combat system is hard to sell, I also skipped it initially because I misjudged it based on buzzwords, although the creative combat system turned itself out to be the best part of the game.
But otherwise, all they had to do was show some of the flashy animations and cut-scenes to draw people in. Card games like Magic, Pokemon, etc. were also highly popular, so being partly a card game ought to be a selling point with proper advertisement.

I hope they or someone else reuses some elements from the combat system in the future.

 

[Galdred]

I am a bit surprised that this flopped commercially. The game appears to me that it should be the wet dream of any Marvel movie fan. I would have thought that they could have sold a solid amount of units based on that. Has the whole superhero movie buzz finally died off, or did the game get no advertisement?

Both imo. It being a turn-based card game also didn't do it any favors with the mainstream Marvel fans.

I get that the combat system is hard to sell, I also skipped it initially because I misjudged it based on buzzwords, although the creative combat system turned itself out to be the best part of the game.
But otherwise, all they had to do was show some of the flashy animations and cut-scenes to draw people in. Card games like Magic, Pokemon, etc. were also highly popular, so being partly a card game ought to be a selling point with proper advertisement.

I hope they or someone else reuses some elements from the combat system in the future.

They completely botched the comics book aesthetics, though. Even the "comic book covers" you can generate look more like soulless 3D comics than anything marvel.