And our time in Marrakesh comes to an end…

It’s been strange playing Hitman for an audience, but not in the way that you’d think. After spending so much time playing games for YouTube, both with Sam on Interactive Friction, and solo with my Blood Money LP, I’ve gotten much more used to talking into a microphone knowing others will one day hear and edited version of it.

What’s been strange, about this series in particular, is that this is the first time that I’ve been doing an LP at the same time, or at least shortly after, the thing I’m LPing is releasing more and more parts or itself. I’m used to playing for an audience well after my opinions on the game I am playing has already been formed, and I’ve had time to ponder it.

To an extent, that’s true for Hitman 2016 as well. By the time I started recording this series, episode 4 had just been released, so I had my impressions of most of the content already mostly established. But come episode 4 and up, I’m recording my footage and my post-commentary at most weeks after experiencing the content for the first time.

So after this, we’ll start transitioning to the point where I exit my comfort zone. It’s a little intimidating, but I hope that I can continue to deliver content that meets or exceeds the expectations set by you, the viewer.

Today, we monkey around in the Deep Jungle.

If you’ve been following the stories of each individual worlds in Kingdom Hearts 1, you’ll notice that none of them thus far have been straight copies of the movies. While each of them do use the same characters and set-pieces from those movies, they are remixing them in a way that re-contextualizes them to make more sense in the context of Kingdom Hearts.

This game is also better at inserting Sora, Donald, and Goofy into these worlds without it feeling superficial or out-of-place. The personal drama and overall plot of our heroes also gets tied into each world.

Deep Jungle is important not just because it’s where the party comes together and forms a whole unit, but it’s also a demonstration of how The Heartless can be drawn to a world. Until the darkness in Clayton’s heart beckoned them, Deep Jungle was a peaceful place.

Clayton man. He’s a bad dude…

Welcome to Marrakesh, where we stop a government coup just because someone would lose money if it went through.

Marrakesh is roughly the same size of Sapienza, but it never gives off that the impression that it’s as big. There’s a good reason for that.

In Sapienza, there was a fairly large and sprawling town and a manor within that town, with a laboratory underneath it. All three of these zones were woven pretty tightly together, and there are several ways to move from one zone into the other. Though there were distinctions between each location, they were pretty blurry and loose.

However, Marrakesh operates slightly differently. There is that same separation of zones, but it feels a lot more concrete. Where players in Sapienza can almost accidentally transition from one sphere of influence to another, it’s hard to say the same about Marrakesh. The level almost forms a triangle, with the bazaar, consulate, and military camp each forming a single vertex of it. Lines between each one guarded and tightly funneled. If I drew a similar shape for Sapienza, it would be much more complicated.

That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a interesting approach when all the other levels up until Morocco were much less restricting. Compared to Sapienza, Morocco is less loved by the player base, and some even call it the “worst level of the game”. I don’t really have an opinion either way, but it’s funny that even the “worst level” is still miles above a lot of the terrible part of Blood Money and other titles in the series.

We go to Olympus Colosseum, and I somehow make an Ayn Rand joke…

To fill out what was left out of this series, after we finish up in this world, we return later to participate in more tournaments and eventually kick the crap out of Hades. Later, Sephiroth appears, but that’s not canon. We don’t come back here, so I might as well get it out of the way for completion’s sake.

My “Ayn Rand’s Parasites” comment might seem completely out of left field, but it’s more fitting than I’d like it to be. Frankly, the companion AI is stupid. Most players will start off by removing every item from their allies’ inventories because they’ll likely waste them in a stupid way.

Or at least, they might if they don’t spend of most of a given boss fight knocked out. By and large, the player (as Sora) will be doing all of the work. On top of that, your party is unable to deliver a finishing blow. The fatal hit *must* come from Sora, or the boss will keep attacking.

So while it’s nice to have party members, you’ll rarely think about them.

In this episode, we grow small to visit Wonderland.

Just to make our respect for her clear, we want to point out once more that the voice actress, Kathryn Beaumont, is still voicing the same character that she’s been voicing since 1951.

Also, get used to me saying “I actually really like this boss fight,” because I end up saying it a lot over the course of this series. Each one of these boss fights has it’s own gimmick that separates them from the others. As a result, each one of them feels fresh and interesting, even if you’ve played the game multiple times (like I have).

To appropriate an overused phrase, “It’s like Dark Souls”.

I want to talk about content ID. Starting from 2:25 and ending at 3:17 of this episode of Hitman (2016), I hide in a coffin in a morgue, attached to a church. During this time, an angelic song plays in the background.

Imagine my surprise when I found this shortly after I uploaded the video (it was unlisted at the time, like most of my videos are pre-release).

Yes, the song was from legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and it was copyright claimed by a group called Atmosphere TV (or, more accurately, a bot on their behalf).

None of this will be new or interesting if you are one of those people who knows how YouTube works and what it is like. But it’s more evidence that their ecosystem is broken in a severe way. I uploaded this video a month ago and got the dispute filed the day after, when I saw it was made. But that still gives Atmosphere TV 30 days to respond.

I have a day job and don’t make money off my YouTube content, so this doesn’t affect me personally at all. For someone whose livelihood comes off YouTube, this would mean that the claimant has 30 days to just mooch off their content and bleed them dry without having to do anything beyond saying that Mozart is owned by them.

YouTube does have a process (and from my experience testing it, not a bad one) to scrub the song from the video, but I shouldn’t have to scrub my video of public domain content just because someone else falsely claimed to own it.

YouTube, fix your broken system.

Our time in Sapienza comes to an end…

The episodic nature of this game is pretty unique. Until this game came out, the only time the episodic model was seen was in the likes of Telltale’s adventure games and others like them. Developers didn’t try to use that model in other products. Alan Wake had “episodes”, but it was still one full retail game on release.

When this game was first announced, everyone was weary of it. Not only did Absolution fail to stick the landing, but the business behind this game was so scatterbrained that it seemed like IO and Square Enix didn’t know what they were doing.

But it works…

As it turns out, each level is big enough that it can stand of its own. I spend a good 2 hours on my initial run in each level, and so far I’ve spent more playtime in this game than I have in all my playthroughs of Blood Money combined.

There’s usually just enough content in a level, plus all the Escalation Missions, Contracts, and Elusive Targets, that there is a lot of replayability on offer. By the time you’re completely done with Hitman, there’s some new piece of content just out on the horizon.

Even for someone like me, who only plays one “main” game at a time, I can fit it into my schedule my dedicating a weekend or a little bit of time to Hitman, then going back to what I’m actually playing as my “main” title.

I scorned them before the Hitman Beta for how they planned to roll out this new game, but not only do I respect IO for sticking to their guns, I think it resulted in a much more engaging product overall. It makes me wonder how else an episodic model might be applied to improve a game. It’s possible Hitman is in a unique position to use it, since the games were always more about gameplay than story. However, I find it hard to believe that Hitman is the only such game.

Our recounting of the Kingdom Hearts series continues as we destroy the Destiny Islands and beat up Final Fantasy characters.

In this episode, we compare Sora and Riku to Naruto and Sasuke. This is a more apt comparison then we expected it to be in the episode, and we actually end up making that comparison again several times in the primer for Kingdom Hearts 1.

Sora, like Naruto, is a naive teenager whose simple charm gives him an almost supernatural aptitude for gaining and maintaining friendships with other people. They both tend to get in way over their heads, but still manage to save the day against all odds.

Riku, like Sasuke, is wiser than his friend. Though there is a sense of friendship, this friendship is as competitive as it is cooperative. Although Riku and Sasuke start out superior to their rivals/friends, the fact that their friends keep getting better, stronger, and happier leads to a growing jealousy and sentiment. This causes them to turn on their once friend, and now enemy.

The difference being that Riku only needed one game to get over it, while it took Sasuke an entire series to do the same.

Fuck Sasuke.

After our fabulous performance in Paris, we head to Italy for some much a needed vacation… and murder.

After this episode, I looked up the use of the Modern Lethal Syringe, just in case I had missed a good, or at least an interesting, use for it.

Unfortunately, my conclusion seems to be the consensus. The modern lethal syringe only exists so that even if the player can’t find good lethal poison in a level, that they still have a valid method of complete challenges for taking care of targets with poison.

But this renders the weapon redundant in a few ways. Most missions have a poison vial somewhere in the level. I have personally found a vial in every level aside from Sapienza. So even if the syringe wasn’t there, I could still get poison kills.

And speaking of Sapienza, leveling up to level 11 in Sapienza nets players the infinitely more useful Lethal Poison Vial. Instead of having to directly inject the poison into a target, like with the syringe, the poison vial can be used on food and drink, to kill targets when the go for a snack. This will almost always be a more discreet action, take less effort, and put the player in a better position to complete the contract.

There’s nothing wrong with having a few items that aren’t very valuable, and the game isn’t made worse with the inclusion of the lethal syringe. It just seems odd to have it there at all. In any circumstance where it would make sense to use the Modern Lethal Syringe, it would much more sense to use either your bare hands (and free up that slot for another item with more utility) or the Fiber Wire (which as we’ll discuss in the next episode, is also fairly worthless).

Welcome ladies and gentleman. Interactive Friction returns once more. Sam and I have a new idea for a series, and today we’re excited to share it with you.