My thoughts on Indivisible

At first glance, it's easy to be fooled by the amount of effort put into Indivisible's visuals and audio; gorgeously drawn areas, twenty-one unique playable characters, detailed animations, a really nice soundtrack. One might look at the production values put into these aspects, and assume the rest of the game has this much care and attention placed on it. For example, the level design and story - this is a game attempting to be a Metroidvania RPG, afterall, and both of those things are key parts to both of those genres.

That's where the problems start to begin, because once you get past the veneer of the gorgeous visuals, and really get into the meat of the game and try to engage with it as you would other games in the genres it's attempting to emulate, the issues just become increasingly apparent and just begin to compound on each other. Death by a thousand cuts, as they say.

The issues of this are rooted in how it was structured, specifically the nonlinearity throughout basically the entire game. Once you progress far enough past the intro, you get the ability to choose between visiting four different areas - Tai Krung, Kaanul, Iron Kingdom, and Port Maerifa. So, if you begin in Tai Krung, for example, the way the game will play out is you visit there, see some of the problems with it, meet some NPCs, get a new movement skill, do some exploring in the area - until you hit a point you can't progress any further due to lacking a specific movement skill you'd get in another region. So then you might go to Iron Kingdom next, see what its deal is as you did with Tai Krung, until you can't progress any further. Rinse and repeat for the other two locations.

What this means is that the majority of regions have rather rudimentary platforming sections making up the bulk of its map. This gets really emphasized by the amount of backtracking you do in the game, it makes you realize just how uninteresting most of the platforming really is, due to the game having to bend over backwards to accomodate its nonlinear design. I genuinely think it would have benefitted from being linear for a longer period before setting you loose, maybe having you visit locations in a set order for arc 1, then when you begin your revisits in arc 2, being able to choose the order you visit locations then. Maybe, for example, having the order be Tai Krung, to Port Maerifa, to Iron kingdom, to Kaanul. This would mean Tai Krung would have simpler platforming, sure, but this applying to one location instead of all four would have been an improvement.

In game series such as Metroid or Castlevania, you're on a fairly linear path on how you progress through the game for a while before it really opens up. For example, in Super Metroid, you start in Crateria. Then from Crateria to you go Blue Brinstar. In Blue Brinstar, you get the morph ball ability as well as being able to use missiles. With these skills, you revisit Crateria, and in Crateria you get bombs. After getting bombs, you go to Green Brinstar, so on and so forth. Due to the linear structure, even factoring in the backtracking you do, this game is able to actually facilitate your kit slowly expanding in an actually meaningful way. The game does open up a bit later on, and players are given more ways to move around for backtracking quickly and shortcuts that make them feel clever. There's a strong intentional aspect to the level designs in these games. That can't be done here. Instead of a natural progression, each area basically has to have a lesser interesting first half and a more interesting second half - where the second half is made with the assumption the player does at least have more skills.

It genuinely just felt like the first and foremost priority was to make an aesthetically game first, gameplay second. Which I need to get into an oddity with that, as well. The Kickstarter backer NPCs were just a bizarre choice in the end. I can be exploring a location based on the Philippines, for example, which on paper is really neat. The problem is it feels rather immersion breaking to go through these areas that felt like they had a lot of attention to detail for the aesthetic sense in the geography and character designs, only to constantly run into random catgirls, a caricature of Mike Z in a banana hammock, and Zone-tan, of all people. Once I came to the realization that, oh, every character without a portrait is a Kickstarter backer’s original character, the attempts made to depict these regions and their people started to feel a bit hollow, and made the game in general just feel very confused on what it actually wants to be. Along with the knowledge of, y’know, all of these people spent $1,000 dollars each to put their characters in the game just weighing in my mind every single time I spoke to one.

Even with the gripes I've mentioned so far, The Metroidvania aspect isn't even what I'd call the flaccid part. Earlier in this review I used the specific phrasing "attempting to be a Metroidvania RPG", keyword here is "attempting". I struggle to call this an RPG, and merely a game wearing the skin of one. It has turn-based combat and party members and cutscenes, sure. However, it's hard not to compare it to titles that came before it, such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. This title may not have turn-based combat or party members, but it does have weapons, armor, and accessories, with these making a tangible difference to your stats - something Indivisible lacks. Indivisible does have stats, but for the most part they're tied solely to story progress. You can do one singular major story cutscene, and your health and damage suddenly multiplies itself tenfold. You do get some experience through doing battles, but the battles start to feel largely not worth engaging with.

What really contributes to this feeling is that enemies' stats scale with you. When you get ten times stronger, so do all of the enemies of the game, so even when you're backtracking to Ashwat, the literal first area of the game, and refighting the enemies which make up the first handful of combat encounters, the fights will still take a minute or two each time. Aside from things like the ability to do extra attacks you get from collecting Ringsels, there's no real moment where you really sit and think to yourself "wow, I'm so strong now." The majority of the focus on actually feeling tangibly stronger comes almost solely from the movement abilities for traversing the overworld.

Speaking of Ringsels, that brings me to another weird aspect. In addition to attempting to be a Metroidvania RPG, it's ALSO attempting to be a collectathon. Throughout the game, you're collecting red beads called Ringsels, 108 of them total to be precise. After collecting certain increment amounts of them, you get a boost to your stats, specifically boosting the amount of attacks you can do or to your defense. I understand the significance behind why you're collecting 108 of these beads, but it felt like the developers didn't think enough about the gameplay implications of having this many collectables in a game of this structure. Some of them are obtained by doing genuinely interesting platforming challenges where the player would really need to know how to make the most of their kit. Other times, you collect a large amount of them where they're basically right next to next to objectives you'd need to meet to continue the game, where you really feel like the developers were tugging at their collars trying to figure out how to actually achieve having exactly 108 of these to collect. A bulk of the map seriously feels like the only reason it exists is to hide Ringsels.

Another oddity with this game is the fact it's genuinely just not very good at explaining certain mechanics. You'd think it would be, with the amount of popups you get explaining how to do things. When you do actually get things explained to you, it's helpful. The problem is there's at least two instances of a mechanic being introduced with quite literally no hints to the fact it even exists. One thing is the fact that as Ajna gains the powers she gets by progressing the narrative, you also get additional types of counters you can perform. Another being the fact you're expected to know to buttonmash during the final boss, with no indication you're supposed to. Then another being the fact that once you recruit Yan, Ajna's level 2 super changes to give her the ability to do combo attacks to the enemy, as long as there's remaining meter. This one is especially odd to me, because Yan is one of the few playable party members that get no special attack for using meter. It felt like Ajna's upgrade for recruiting her could have went to Yan instead, to actually give her an interesting gameplay gimmick.

That brings me to the party members, another thing I specifically need to touch on. There's twenty-one playable characters, including Ajna herself. In combat, nearly everyone is excellent. Like, of course every cast will have some characters that are lower on the tier list, so with a cast this size it's hardly a surprise there's a few here that just aren't as compelling or strong as the others. That's fine to me, that aspect doesn't bother me at all, it's typical of any game, and the amount that are actually really compelling in this aspect is a real treat. I wasn't too bothered by the fact Yan, to use her as an example again, didn't have much interesting gameplay, since you can just slot in someone else in the party instead.

The problem I really have is the writing. With the disjointed nonlinearity of when you pick up certain party members, with quite a few being entirely optional, only a handful are actually prevalent in the story in any form, which tends to be the ones you met before the game actually opens up to become nonlinear - Dhar, Razmi, Zebei, and Thorani - and then Baozhai, who gets to be prevalent because she's tied with one of the two methods of fast travel. Chatacters such as Tungar can't be too prevalent because a player might not have him. Then, Phoebe's recruitment is tied to recruiting Tungar, so you can't make her prevalent, because you might not have recruited Tungar.

That's where things really start to bother me. There's a lot of good ideas for characters, and I find it really neat that different characters represent different cultures in the Pacific Islands, Asia, Africa, South America, and Mesoamerica. However, I don't really think good ideas alone can really be all a character amounts to. There were just too many cast members for this game to actually have any balance for the RPG aspect. There were occasions where a character only shows up in a cutscene to go "..." with an accompanying groaning voiceclip, and my friends and I got excited he actually showed up at all to begin with.

Aside from their introduction cutscene, character-specfic sidequests, and final farewells, most of these characters have no real depth, development, or any contribution to the main story. For example, the literal only time Tungar has any instance where he shows up in any cutscenes at all, from the time he becomes recruitable in arc 1, to the sidequests being added as a feature in arc 3, was him showing up in Phoebe's recruitment quest. He doesn't even show up to interject with a single "..." like Zebei does, a character who's recruitable in the exact same area as him. The sad part about this is, this still means he's given more characterization than some other recruitable party members, such as Leilani, who felt like she just didn't have any real rapport built up with the rest of the cast.

It's especially frustrating, because I've seen much more elegant solutions for party members that haven't been recruited done in other games. For example, in Rune Factory 4, if you haven't progressed the story far enough to rescue Amber, she just doesn't appear in cutscenes of villagers engaging in chit-chat around the town, no one mentions her because no one knows about her yet, and the dialog proceeds naturally without her. However, once she is actually rescued, she does actually start showing up and having actual relevance to the story and other assorted dialog. This also goes for the other three characters in this game that this applies to. It goes a long way to making these characters feel like established characters that have actual rapport with other characters. I'm aware they were able to do a more elegant solution due to the smaller scale here, only having to deal with four recruitable characters instead of the amount in this game.

This is the problem, it felt like the development team just bit off way more than they could actually chew. While it's neat conceptually to have so many characters, it just felt like it needed fewer for the developers to actually be able to handle writing the full cast. Characters can actually be compellingly written, with Razmi being a standout here as a character who I enjoyed every time she came up, it felt like the writers had a lot of fun using her weirdness to set up punchlines. I also really enjoyed Baozhai, her being a brash, loudmouth pirate while also having an extremely apparent crush on Thorani was really endearing. The issue with characters being actually compellingly written, however, is the fact they'd have to actually show up to know that they are. Some of these characters don't even get voiced lines aside from during combat and their final farewells to Ajna.

As for the sidequests, you don't even get anything from completing them aside from a star next to their name, an extra unlocked color palette, and a bit of a stat boost. There's one singular exception to this, where one character actually does receive tangible gameplay benefits aside from the stats - Latigo's sixth bullet in his gun's chamber becoming useable in combat. That's it. It felt like such a wasted opportunity to not do anything gameplay-wise with the others, because Latigo's gameplay changing actually felt like a really compelling conclusion to his character arc. It made me want to see the others actually get meaningful changes too.

These sidequests also feel very odd. This is where the backtracking I mentioned earlier really starts to become apparent and hard to ignore. Eighteen of these twenty-one playable characters all have their own unique sidequests associated with them. The exceptions being Ajna, who you're playing as, Kushi, whose sidequest is tied to Zebei's, and Dhar, who I'll get to later. All of them are unlocked in the third act, and all of them follow the same basic gameplay structure. You might, for example, be asked by a character to visit Tai Krung, from there get sent to Lhan, from there get sent to Port Maerifa, then back to Tai Krung, then back to Lhan. All eighteen sidequests follow this same basic structure, just with different locations.

This is where the backtracking and dull level design comes into play. There's two methods of fast travel, along with maps connecting to each other in typical Metroidvania fashion. On paper, this sounds fine, but in reality it's just another example of how this game is built on the principles of visuals first, gameplay second. This game managed the bizarre feat of both the fast travel and the shortcuts really not doing anything to alleviate how long it takes to actually traverse the maps. In trying to facilitate having 108 ringsels, the maps are just way too big, and you don't really get a fast way to navigate areas. It felt like there were attempts to create shortcuts typically seen in Metroidvanias, but the moveset never feels like it ever builds to the point of letting you navigate areas quickly, even the movement ability you get right before the final boss doesn't feel as satsifying as Samus's Shinespark or Screwattack. You literally get the ability to teleport, and even that feels restrictive. So when you're going through sidequests, and you're doing what feels like five different sidequests back to back that for some reason keep sending you back to Ginseng's parents in Tai Krung for no reason, you just get so tired of the trek to get there.

Anyway, let's get to the elephant in the room. Let's talk about Dhar, the character whom I mentioned earlier doesn't get his own sidequest, and the character whom I feel exemplifies the issues this game actually has with the writing. Like, I'm not dense, I know that in real life, Ajna would have no reason to have to forgive him for killing her father. However, this is a video game asking you to suspend your disbelief and accept you're a character with the power to absorb people into your mind, and one that's also expecting you to suspend your disbelief and accept the fact it's pushing two very conflicting narratives about him. The first is that he's an awful, irredeemable person for killing her father. The second is that he was a confused, immature, young man who's been groomed his entire life as a child soldier to cause harm in the name of Lord Ravannavar. That he's just like Ajna, in the sense he genuinely didn't know what he was doing. That he was genuinely trying to redeem himself and turn over a new leaf. That's where the writing frustrates me most. It's so inconsistent on how it expects you to view him. One cutscene can have him say a perfectly reasonable, if a bit crass, objection to something, only for him to be met with being told to shut up. The next cutscene can show him genuinely softening up, and the cast sharing a nice moment with him. Then to the next cutscene just telling him to shut up again.

This inconsistency really compounds after he decides to sacrifice himself to stop Ajna's path of destruction. After he dies, the game still can't make up its mind on how it wants the player to view him. It keeps flip-flopping between Ajna and other characters going "screw that guy, he sucks" and "man, I genuinely feel really bad that he sacrificed himself for my sake." It goes back and forth on this on nearly every cutscene he's brought up after his death. Ajna gets forgiven basically wholly for her various misdeeds throughout the game, with Zebei being the only other party member who shows any real apprehension towards her. Meanwhile, Dhar, who the game makes explicitly clear is a parallel towards Ajna in many ways, doesn't get this forgiveness. The game feels like it forgets he really isn't even that much older than Ajna, only being four years older at twenty. An adult, sure, but one at an age where you're still naive, and young enough that before he dies, a handful of characters comment that they don't even know if he's of legal drinking age. This naivety combined with, again, literally being a child soldier, feels like it isn't given the weight it really deserves in the narrative.

Another character who also acts as a parallel to Dhar and has a similar backstory and situation to him, Kampan, gets forgiven with basically no friction. Kampan isn't the only antagonist character to get forgiven either, with Ren being another. Like Dhar, he even starts at negative affinity with Ajna, to reflect the fact he's been antagonizing her and the party. Which does bring me to needing to mention, I wasn't being entirely honest earlier when I mentioned the fact only Dhar, Razmi, Zebei, Thorani, and Baozhai are prevalent in the main story. Kampan and Ren are technically exceptions here, with Kampan antagonizing Ajna while in the Iron Kingdom, and Ren antagonizing Ajna while in Tai Krung. In the process of Ajna resolving the issues of these respective locations, both of them are given the opportunity to turn over a new leaf and assist Ajna. I used the word "technically" before, because once party members, their relevancy to the main story fades, so I wasn't being entirely dishonest.

What really gets me about Ren especially, is that upon recruitment, he gives Ajna the ability to use his kusarigama in combat. Meanwhile, when you revisit the site where Dhar dies and find his sword embedded in the ground, instead of Ajna picking it up and using it, as something else symbolic of his sacrifice for her, it's just left in the ground. It felt like such a missed opportunity. Which brings me to the fact that yes, I am aware that this game had very troubled development. I am aware that there was also a cancelled DLC centered around Dhar, as well. Even then, however, I'm not sure the contents of that DLC would've alleviated for me the fact that the entire narrative involving his character felt very slipshod. Especially when he was one of the few characters of twenty-one to even have any focus in the main story's narrative to begin with, it makes the issues with how he was written stand out even further.

Of course, I can't act like the entire game is bad, that would be incredibly disingenuous, as much as I'd like to say the game sucks outright. It's an incredibly fun co-op game, the combat is fun both inside and outside the turn-based battles, and so forth. However, I find myself wondering if the fact I played it as co-op while bantering with a couple friends about mundane things - while enduring the repetitive, lengthy backtracking - carried the experience for me. I find myself wondering if I'd actually have as much fun playing the game as it was designed, as a singleplayer experience. I wasn't in control of Ajna, instead Dhar and later Ren during my playthrough, so I admittedly don't know the full tactile experience of actually engaging with the platforming as designed. But I mean, I think when you're watching someone engaging through it in real-time, with their player being right next to yours for twenty three hours, you can at least have a safe estimated guess at what it feels like. And with that in mind, I can't say I'd ever want to play the game again myself. I think I'd rather just go play Valkyrie Profile instead.

It's very apparent throughout the game that this was an incredibly mismanaged project, with not enough people brought onboard for the actual level design that you have to engage with for the entire duration, with instead the focus being on more superficial elements such as the visuals. It's something you can just feel. And while I do have a lot of empathy for the people who did work on it, and wish that they got the opportunity to actually make something better, I don't think I can fully excuse the quality. This is a product you can buy for money and have to engage with the state it's currently in, afterall. So with that in mind, I don't think I can recommend anyone to ever buy this and spend the time playing it. It's not like the money would go to anyone except the publisher, anyway, due to the studio behind this game disbanding before it got properly finished.

Anyway, that brings me to the bottom line. My only reward for completing a difficult, nine phase bossfight was seeing Mike Z in a banana hammock make a joke about how huge his cock is, so the game is utter dogshit, actually.