Remnant: From The Ashes Completed

25 August, 2020. 742 words.

First, catching up on Promptapalooza prompts:

Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche. Ugh. I feel like all my hobbies have fallen by the wayside. But music, writing, stuff like that.

Tell us about some of your favourite antagonists and explain why. Recently, Abby from The Last Of Us Part 2, though I would say it’s arguable whether she’s an antagonist or a protagonist.

What piece of content would you most like to have a sequel or reboot? I was pretty disappointed when I heard Mindhunters was cancelled, so there’s one. Otherwise can’t think of anything.

What is your greatest fear, and how does it impact the type of content you create or consume? Answering this would probably trigger that fear.

How did you get the name that you regularly go by online, and what if anything does it mean? ]CC[-UltrViolet was my clan name in Quake.

How did you get started in content creation? Honestly, I have no memory of a time in my life when I was not “creating content” of some kind or another.

Secondly, I finished the campaign of Remnant: From The Ashes last night.

After defeating the Undying King (which was optional, but I backed myself into a corner by giving the heart thingy to the Iskal Queen), I defeated Stormcaller (annoying), Onslaught (easy), The Ravager (annoying), and the final Nightmare (super annoying) to “win” the game. Which was, not surprisingly, a big anticlimax. I was wrong before: The game’s story has a good beginning, a boring middle, and a boring ending.

I had to Google the Nightmare boss to find out how I was actually supposed to kill it, because, as per usual, the game did not give any hints or clues as to how the boss was supposed to be killed. Based on my experience with the game’s rather nonsensical boss designs, I just assumed it was intended to take an hour to whittle down a million billion hit points.

In the end, I found the most effective weapon was a starter weapon: The Hunter’s Rifle, which I bought at the vendor at the beginning to replace the worthless Coach Gun, upgraded to +15 by the end, equipped with a Hot Shot mod which I also bought at the vendor at the beginning. As my alternate, I used the Repeater pistol that was given to me at the beginning as well. Every single one of the other weapons and mods that were given to me as rewards over the course of the game felt pretty useless to me, with the brief exception of the Beam Rifle, which worked pretty well for a time against one stretch of plant-like enemies.

I used the starter Cultist armor with a Twisted mask I got near the beginning. I mainly used two damage-boosting rings and a damage-boosting amulet for the entire run. I very rarely used any consumables to fight bosses, except occasionally removing the burning or bleeding status. I was able to brute force my way through most bosses by pointing my gun at the big thing and shooting it a lot, while dodging the damage coming toward me, which mostly involved staying on-the-run constantly. Most non-boss enemies throughout the game could be easily dispatched by strafing sideways, which usually negated their ranged attacks, while shooting them in the head before they came into melee range.

My biggest enemy throughout the game was always an inopportune reload time, or running out of stamina at an inconvenient time so I couldn’t dodge or run, or walking into some other random confluence of enemy attacks that were impossible to predict or avoid.

Death seemed to have very little consequence in this game, being just a minor setback. Yet another reason this game should never have been labeled a “Souls-like” game. In a Souls game, you usually creep around desperately afraid of getting killed by whatever might be hiding around the next corner, constantly evaluating a risk versus reward computation in your head, but in Remnant: From The Ashes, I routinely charged ahead blindly into hordes of enemies without any fear of losing anything.

In summary, it was worth the free price tag. I would have been irritated if I’d paid full price for it. But it’s a good game for playing when you just want to occupy your hands with mindless grinding while listening to a podcast or audio book or something.

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