![]() Its lyrics describe an airship as a symbol of humanity’s hopes and dreams, a theme that resonated with me, very powerfully. However, it was the song “Airships” by VNV Nation that planted the seeds for what eventually became Airship. In “ Laputa”, an airship is a mythical machine dominating the sky, and in “ Kiki”, a majestic but fragile giant. I first came across airships in Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service. I methodically assembled layers of musical phrases around a central refrain, which either plays throughout the track or emerges at a key moment. This cathartic cycle directly informed my approach to the music on Airship. Each repetition distills some things and crystallises others, whether they are thoughts, ideas or emotions. In pursuit of this, I build my music around loops, using repeating melodies like mantras. I make experimental music in the ambient electronic genre because it is inherently meditative and I want my music to have that quality in some form. Its all either over-sized Roman ruins, thatched roof cottages, or very similarly shaped churches.Music has always been my recourse whenever I need to reflect on life and process my experiences. While there is some solid variety in climates, the cities are even more copy-pasted than Odyssey and the cities really weren't that fun to parkour around in (though that can probably be blamed on the time setting). There is little customization, and many of the upgrades are either pointless (like giving you tattoos that you can't see except when you're getting tattoos) or buildings that play into griding (like building linked to fishing.). Forgotten fields trailer upgrade#Lastly, the village upgrade system isn't as cool as I hoped it would be. The map is littered with MMO style simple missions with no story ramifications. The main quest mostly consists of a web of sidequests that get fairly repetitive. It doesn't have the lovable characters of Odyssey or half the charm. The game would have benefitted greatly from a more tried and true leveling system. You leveled up constantly even from completing menial side missions. Some abilities were unlocked through this web of upgrades while others had to be discovered. It adopts this really weird upgrade web where you'd be forced to choose between endless tiny upgrades in this web that you would barely feel the effect of like +3% bow damage. The leveling system in Valhalla is atrocious. The ideal system would be the item selection of Odyssey with less common drops and the upgrade system of Valhalla, but if I had to choose between the two, I'm taking Odyssey's because it made killing important baddies more rewarding. The armor is also just not visually unique enough IMO. There were 14 bows, 13 shields, 3 hammers, 4 daggers, 5 1-handed axes, 7 2-handed axes, 4 spears, 3 flails, 3 2-handed swords. They also had really bizarre choices in which weapons the base game had. which wasn't as rewarding as getting some cool unique helmet or whatever like you got in Odyssey. The problem with this is that the weapon pool was way too small and doing raids or killing major enemies just resulted in getting crafting materials. In its place they had a much smaller item pool with just a couple upgrade levels that brought minor cosmetic changes to the weapons. They ditched the broad itemization of Odyssey along with the simple pay-to-upgrade system (which sucked). I think it highlights the best of Valhalla's strengths - great atmosphere and beautiful worlds.Īs someone that also really liked Odyssey, I was disappointed in Valhalla. I haven't played the Paris or Ragnarok DLC, but I really enjoyed the Ireland DLC. And normally I'm one who loves long games. Even I, as someone who really enjoyed the game, can confidently say it wouldn't have been any worse had they straight up deleted 20 hours of content. This makes the game extremely long and hurts the pacing a lot. However, a lot of quests that should have been side-missions are expanded and are instead made mandatory main story missions. The game ditches traditional side quests for "encounters" a-la RDR. Others simply don't care about that at all (ie the types that wish Black Flag was just a straight up pirate game and ditched the AC stuff).Īs for bloat, it's probably the worst it's ever been in Valhalla. So some who felt like Odyssey barely felt like an AC game liked that a bit about Valhalla. There is also the return of one-hit assassinations (via QTE) and social stealth. Others like the loot grind and got bored with Valhalla.Įven though you don't play as an Assassin in Valhalla, the story does feature them a bit more than Odyssey. Valhalla ditches random loot, and some people prefer that because you spend a lot less time micromanaging gear and stats in this game (you still do it a lot, but not nearly as frequently). ![]()
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