Please God, Just Let me Play The Videogame
On Marvel's Midnight Suns
Pre-release I wrote about the decision to make Marvel’s Midnight Suns a card game.
Post-release I’m revisiting the game to discuss various design elements. The main takeaway: there’s a better game in here buried under a pile of just too much stuff.
Combat
My first post was about the tension of Midnight Suns being both a superhero game and a card game. Playing it extensively I see that tension in action, though the card game element hurts audience appeal more than it does gameplay.
Sometimes in Midnight Suns I play card called “Blast” and Iron Man blasts a guy. Makes sense. But sometimes I play a card called “Spider Sense” and draw two cards while reducing the cost of “heroic” cards by 1 - something that has no relation to Spider-Man sensing danger and doesn’t translate well from card game rules to in-game fiction.
Midnight Sun’s combat is at its best when you’re doing superhero things - grabbing a guy and slamming him into another guy, kicking a crate at some thugs to knock them over, etc. Where it’s less successful, for me, is when it leans too heavily towards card game mechanics and away from super-heroism.
Ghost Rider has a card that forces you to discard your hand, potentially discarding cards you wanted. That downside becomes an upside if you wanted to dump useless cards and draw new ones. This design has interesting tradeoffs and appeals to game designer brains. But it has nothing to do with Ghost Rider running people over with a flaming car. In theory it’s satisfying to craft a deck that does card gamey things like lowering casting costs and drawing cards, but to me that feels less heroic and less satisfying than just bonking a guy on the head with a crate.
In missions where you have to retrieve items you defeat enemies who drop “retrieve item” cards. What does it mean for an enemy to carry a card? Yu-Gi-Oh! is about card battles, so its characters wielding cards makes sense. But in the in-game fiction of Midnight Suns the characters are punching and shooting lasers, not playing cards.
Some defeated enemies drop a “Focusing Beacon” card. Canonically the enemy carried this beacon, and when you play the card your character deploys it. But sometimes an enemy drops a card like “Delay Truck” that’s just a card. It doesn’t represent a wheel lock. It’s a piece of rules with no in-fiction analog. The enemy was carrying the vague capacity to delay a truck, which was somehow transferred to your characters?
As I said in my first post on Midnight Suns, these are jigsaw puzzle pieces that don’t fit together perfectly. Not a deal-breaker but not ideal.
Combat Minimalism
You can only (normally) move one character per turn, but you can move them anywhere, so there’s no fussing with action points or movement grids. Maps are small and you only bring three heroes into battle. There’s no cover, no miss chance and no fog of war. Combat is minimalistic and puzzly - it’s far more Into the Breach than X-Com.
That’s fine - the battle is fun! It feels mobile-game-esque, but not in a bad way. But it’s a bit limiting. Positioning is very important; a large part of the game is knocking enemies into other enemies, knocking them into exploding barrels or electrified equipment, darting between nearby enemies, etc. But as the player you don’t have much control over your character’s movement, and between rounds enemies can move anywhere. So positioning is important without many ways to influence it.
In some missions you protect an object from enemy attacks, but the game has few protection mechanics. Enemies can move anywhere and target anything, so you can’t take a defensive formation or erect cover; protecting an object mostly means killing the enemies quickly.
As far as I’ve seen there are no missions where you infiltrate a position, find and escort some VIPs, flush out enemies, or have a running firefight. Instead of uncovering new enemies as you explore a map they simply run onto the map from out of bounds each turn. That can get tedious.
But, overall, the combat is pretty fun! The big problem with the minimalism, that I’ll get into later, is that the rest of the game is incredibly maximalist.
Plot and Narrative Setup: When the Least Interesting Character is You
I’m not going critique the writing or plot beats, but I want to touch on the narrative setup, as it greatly impacts the overall design.
Instead of playing as an existing Marvel character you play as “The Hunter”, a chosen one with amnesia, a decision I find outdated and misguided.
Genre stories often have an audience point-of view-character - a story set in the future might include a character from our time who wakes up from cryo-sleep. That gives us someone to relate to, and gives writers an excuse to deliver exposition, since that character, like the audience, needs to be filled in. Sometimes a character is meant to represent a target demographic - Wesley in Star Trek: TNG and Lucas on Sea Quest: DSV were both plucky smart teens, meant to appeal to teen male viewers.
The Hunter seems birthed from the mindset that players need an audience surrogate to help get them on board. It feels unconfident, in the same way the first X-Men movies clad its characters in black Matrix-like outfits instead of their real costumes. That arguably made sense at the time, but we’re in 2024 now. There have been 33 Marvel movies and 250 hours of Marvel film and TV content. Movie Wolverine can now wear a real Wolverine outfit and players can play as Wolverine rather than a “you” character. They don’t need a stand-in, and they really don’t need one who wanders around asking “so Blade…what’s your story? You a vampire or something?”
Comic books stories are often bad, but they aren’t often laden with exposition and backstory. If anything superhero comics have the opposite problem: they need a fight every 22 pages. Midnight Suns is full of exposition about things most players already know or could easily find out.
It’s - and I mean this in a derogatory way - a very video game setup. Amnesiac protagonist needs everything explained to them by way of “tell me about…” dialogue trees.
It’s hard to overstate how much of a non-character The Hunter is, in both personality and mechanics, especially put against the established Marvel characters.
Many of The Hunter’s conversations simply deliver exposition. Some conversations reveal the personalities of the Marvel characters, but The Hunter is taciturn and unspecific. You can game these conversations for both darkside / lightside points and for relationship points, which encourages min-maxing over role-playing, so The Hunter’s personality changes to match whatever’s optimal. But even if you wanted to roleplay the dialogue choices are lots of “that sounds tough”, “I don’t envy your position”, “tell me more” and so on. My Hunter has all the personality of a sheet of cardboard.
I’ve seen many complaints of “bad writing”, and I don’t entirely disagree with them, but making the protagonist a clichéd JRPG hero is doing narrative on hard mode. Even great writers would be hard-pressed to write compelling dialogue given constraints like “the plot must unfold very slowly as the hero languidly recovers from amnesia” and “the hero has to ask every character what the deal is with their powers.”
Mechanically this character is also a miss for me. Magik is pretty cool - you create portals then knock enemies through them. Captain Marvel can power up into Binary and has ways to taunt enemies and generate shields so she’s a bit of a bruiser / tank. Nico’s gimmick is she can’t cast the same spell twice, so her cards are based around random effects, often determined at draw time.
The Hunter character has vague “light” and “dark” powers which translates into healing, self-damage, and a lot of miscellaneous. (I assume in part to remain flexible since you have to take her on story missions)
When Ghost Rider knocks a guy into another guy, something many characters can do, he does it with a flaming chain, so it has some character-specific pizazz. My Hunter also knocks enemies around, but she does it by bonking them with her swords. When writing this I wasn’t sure if they were swords or tonfas, I had to look it up. She’s not a sword character in same way Ghost Rider is a chain character or Wolverine is a claw goblin, she just has swords she uses sporadically.
To put in bluntly my Hunter feels like an uninspired “OC” - a concept that doesn’t translate into a strong mechanical identity or personality.
Often in video game development you get stuck in something you know isn’t ideal. A frequent culprit is control schemes - you want the player to be able to sprint, jump, dodge and attack all at the same time, but you also have functions like block and parry, and you just can’t make it work with the available buttons. You have a nagging feeling that there’s a better solution but you never find it.
I think I understand why The Hunter is the central character. It allows for an original story crafted to fit the game without baggage. They have a large pool of cards, their powers are more broad, and you can tweak them with lightside / darkside points, so they have high mechanical flexibility - important since they fill one of your precious three slots in story missions. You can customize aspects like skin tone and gender, since they have no canonical appearance.
Allowing the player to play as any character, or to switch between them freely, would require a lot of work, and forcing the player into one specific existing character would be limiting. So I don’t know what the better solutions is, having pondered it for all of 20 minutes. But a better one has to exist - maybe have the player swap between different characters at different parts of the story, like the story modes in Mortal Kombat. I get why you play as The Hunter but I don’t like it, because again, The Hunter is the least interesting character.
Just let me play as Blade!
“It’s a Marvel tactics game that you play with cards” and “you don’t play as your favorite Marvel character, you play as a new guy we invented” both strike me as the dev team skating uphill.
Bloat, or, This Game Would Be Better if It Let Me Play It
So far it may sound like I’m lukewarm on Midnight Suns, but calling out issues without overstating them is important. I don’t like The Hunter as the protagonist but I wouldn’t care too much were the rest of the game fun. And the battle is fun.
Missions have a satisfying level of difficulty (I turned it up when that option became available) and are lightweight enough to prompt a “just one more mission” feeling. If the rest of the game was similarly lightweight relationship management it would be easy to recommend.
But that’s not what the rest of the game is.
The Quest for Content
Many older games in this genre, like Military Madness or Fire Emblem, were virtually all battles. You skipped from one mission to the next with some light exposition between. Other games had light exploration, crafting, outfitting or customization between fights. In Shining Force you explored an RPG-style map with towns and an overworld. In X-COM: UFO Defense you autopsied aliens and performed research. But in my mind nearly all those old games were primarily battle games.
Full-priced games in all genres have become meatier. At the same time, individual battles in tactics games are often slimmed down for accessibility and modernization reasons. Compare GBA-era Fire Emblem games, with their waves and waves of reinforcements, to the newest ones. This leaves developers in a bind - they need to add more “content” while slimming down the primary content.
Between battles in Fire Emblem: Three Houses you spend action points on different activities, set goals for and instruct students, and engage in conversations and diversions like fishing. That’s all engaging content, but apparently not enough content. So there are also chores. Scattered glowing orbs to happen across and lost items to find and return. Each month, to play optimally, you run through the entire monastery, searching every room and corridor, spending much time while extracting precious little fun.
Fire Emblem: Engage has even more home-base chores. There’s food to cook, locations to visit, training, mock battles, choosing farm animals, picking up their products. Almost none of these chores pose satisfying decisions, mechanics or aesthetics. They’re rote tasks - don’t forget to stop and feed the weird mascot character, because feeding them gives you a currency.
Midnight Suns is, unfortunately, one of the worst offenders in the misguided quest for content. It has bite-sized battles but a 40-hour critical path, ballooning to 80+ for completionists. So much of that time is busywork. Collecting respawning glowing orbs of different currencies. Checking the library each day for new book passages that might contain “Arcane Knowledge.” There are reagents to collect. Some story bits are gated by these - to attend mystical meetings you first have to deliver 10 mushrooms. Petting your dog does something tangible- I forget what - so every day stop and pet the dog. The gameplay in these sections is move around and press A at a prompt.
There are other activities I can’t honestly call chores, but ultimately are a chore. Most missions give you Gamma Coils, which you can open for new cards. That means jogging (there’s no running indoors) to the forge and watching a brief cutscene to open your spoils. At the forge you also queue up new research, which you do each day as research takes only a day to complete. Once you’ve opened a Gamma Coil and have new cards you now jog to the training area to combine them. In the training area you can also spar against training partners. These aren’t one-on-one battles; you select an opponent then get a still image listing your rewards. If you got new Intel Caches (another currency) you jog to the War Room and spend them on autonomous side missions. The Abbey, your home base, quickly becomes a laborious 3D menu.
The Abbey grounds have a Metroid-style setup in which you unlock new powers to access new areas. The grounds hold not only mushrooms and weeds to collect but journal entries from a half dozen different characters. There are also capital-M Mysteries strewn about - puzzles to solve that offer rewards or lore. The second time I discovered a mystery and realized that mysteries were a formalized game system it seemed neat. But to solve that mystery, the Mystery of Who My Father Is?, I just walked around and pressed A at prompts. When the mystery was solved the answer to “who is my father?” was “let’s talk more later.”
There are chests containing random cosmetics. To open them you need special keys, another currency. You can hang out with characters to build relationship points, or spend yet another currency, Compliment Points, to butter them up. There are various clubs: a spooky kids club, shop class, a book club. At the spooky kids club you recover your past memories - I did two or three and didn’t recover any memories of note, but top men were working on it.
Besides story missions there are side missions, and they all give you some resource you want. I suppose you could skip them, but combining cards is a primary deck-building mechanic, and to combine them you need currency. So I suspect many players won’t skip them.
The ratio of missions to everything else is way off, and the ratio of story missions - the more authored ones that involve plot movement, scripted moments, and memorable villains - is even lower. I played Midnight Suns for 15 hours and did maybe 3 or 4 story missions, which did almost nothing to advance the plot.
Please God, Just Let Me Play The Video Game
I’m not one of those people who gets angry about games that aren’t “real” games, or who thinks that “mechanics are everything.” I’m using “play” very loosely here: “let me play the game” means “let me engage with the interesting parts.” In Resident Evil that’s shooting zombies, but also includes watching cutscenes, because the cutscenes are entertaining. Playing a walking sim means trudging around and listening to audio logs, and “playing” a visual novel means reading. That’s fine - that’s the content you signed up for.
What isn’t fine is playing a Mega Man spiritual successor that’s constantly interrupted by 10-minute voiced animatics.1
The problem with Midnight Suns is I spend so much time not playing the game.
There’s too much talking for my tastes, or rather, too much fat to the talking - heroes explaining their powers and backstory, plot-centric conversations that don’t advance the story, slice of life moments that don’t reveal much about the characters. But I don’t dislike social sim elements, and I don’t mind casually conversing with Blade about his crush on Captain Marvel. Unlike some critics I don’t loathe the writing and I don’t dread social interactions.
What I dread are the chores.
Every day I wake up and do chores. Then do one mission - if it’s a side mission it might take 10 minutes. Then it’s evening and I do more chores. Then go to bed, wake up, and begin chores again. There’s so much fat that the non-chores - content like mysteries that should be engaging - become chores. If the game was battles, revealing conversations, and every 4 hours you solve a new Mystery those mysteries would be a pretty cool change of pace. But it’s hard to appreciate individual ingredients on a 47-topping pizza - in practice the mysteries are just part of the pile.
When I Stopped Playing
The last time I played I did a battle challenge. It was fun, for the 6 minutes it took to complete. On completion I unlocked a new navigation ability and a new area to explore. I wandered around collecting plants and came across an old church and a Mystery contained within. Strewn about the church were journal pages. Here’s a page from my own diary. Here’s a page of Wanda’s journal. Here’s a page of The Caretaker’s journal. Here’s a page of Agatha’s journal. (These people love journaling!) Here’s a page from Shaw’s journal. That was the first time I’d heard of Shaw - he’s also big into journaling. Also, here’s a painting lying on the ground for some reason.
I came across a mystical barrier - interacting with it played a small cutscene that said go talk to Doctor Strange. That meant I had to go back to the Abbey, have a conversation, then presumably come back here. Instead I decided to explore onward. I collected more mushrooms. I came across another mystery, which I hurried past. There were spots to use my new navigation power on to open routes or uncover hidden items.
Finally I reached the end of this winding path. And I was left thinking:
I still have to talk to Doctor Strange to advance this mystery. It’s not clear what the mystery I’m investigating even is exactly, so I’m not invested in it.
There are many spots on the map I can (and should) now revisit with my new traversal ability. Traversal abilities aren’t swinging around like Spider-Man or doing super jumps like the Hulk - both my abilities effectively open doors. Exploring the Abbey grounds isn’t like exploring in Super Metroid; it’s not mechanically engaging. You just jog around.
When I first entered this new area I had a choice to go north or south, and all of this was north. I haven’t gone south, so that’s more to explore.
I’ve been at this for 20 minutes, doing the rest is going to take another 20 minutes, and none of this is fun. It’s not battle, it’s not conversations, it’s not strategically engaging and it’s not fun for the fingers. It’s collecting mushrooms and reading lore.
When I’m finally done with all this my character will go to bed then wake up to more chores.
So I turned it off.
I’d Like an Abridged Version
The answer to “how could the developers fix up their game?” is nearly always “spend more money.” The Final Fantasy 16 demo left me lukewarm. It doesn’t have enough RPG elements to work as an RPG, it doesn’t have the stats and build variety to work as an action-RPG, and the combat’s too simple to work as a character action game. Improving that would require money - multiple playable characters with different movesets, different weapon types, maybe a full paper-doll equipment system.
The frustrating thing about Midnight Suns is that it’s a game that could be improved simply by removing elements.
The combat design is rooted in minimalism or “subtractive design” - when it doubt keep features out. The rest of the game is the opposite - it’s as if they held an all-hands meeting and said “everyone go around and throw out an idea for Abbey activities and we won’t say no to a single one of them.”
If they had cut some of those features and focused more on the rest (more combat variety, more plot momentum, etc) the game would be better. If they had cut some of those features and spent no additional resources on the rest it would still be better! The ratio of meaningful content to obligatory-feeling uninteresting content is just too high.
Maybe a 25-hour version wouldn’t sell as well, as it wouldn’t deliver the “value”-per-dollar that gamers demand. (Though presumably it would cost less to make) I don’t know - I’m not a sales and marketing expert. But a distilled version would be so much more enjoyable, and it’s sitting right there.
A game that’s half battles and half slice-of-life “Blade organizes a book club and gives a report on Little Women” may not be for everyone. But my criticism of the game isn’t the writing or the social aspect.
My criticism is this: I know devs want to be featured on those “can you pet the dog?” social media accounts, so I get that I can pet the dog. But why do I have to pet the dog, every day I see him? Midnight Suns has too much “content” by way of gristle that adds to the weight of a cut.
You could argue “well what if you like those voiced animatics” but I’ll ignore that argument because I suspect few people, most importantly myself, like them. There are limits to “you can only criticize a game based on what it’s trying to accomplish.”