The big purpose of this episode is to find Ivor's lair out in The Far Lands to find an enchantment book that has the power to destroy the command block that is still lingering inside of the Witherstorm. In a scene with both Soren and Ivor, Jessie discovers that the storm is following the amulet that Gabriel had given him and with that, Axel takes it upon himself to hold onto the amulet while Jessie retrieves the enchantment book. The group collectively agrees that Axel and another member of the Order of the Stone will return to Soren's lair where the Enderman that Soren has collected can help in disassembling the Witherstorm as they had all witnessed them do in an earlier scene. While they are doing that, the plan is to then forge a weapon and fuse the enchantment book with it but in Jessie's fight to do so, he is separated from Ivor who is helping everyone escape from a few lingering witches. Alone and lost, it is up to Jessie and his friends to pass through to Ivor's lair, which happens to be riddled with booby traps and mazes, and return in time to defeat the storm.
Another issue that impacted the episode as a whole were the amount of times that the members of the Order backtracked into flashbacks that told of the argument that disbanded them. While I understand that it's crucial to the story, it took away completely from the decision making and the story that revolves around Jessie and the Wither Storm. The characters, minus a scene with Petra, receive almost no depth and leave it to the environments and the little bit of dialogue to develop them. With the environments being the main reason to play the episode, the lack of exploration doesn't help its case. For a game that is meant to develop according to character choices, there didn't seem to be a whole lot of decision-making going to develop the story further. Hopefully, the cliffhanger ending will pose as an entryway to further Jessie and his friend's role in all of this instead of being focused on the Order.
From everything that we've seen and heard so far, it looks like gaming companies are doing just the same, as an arms race to acquire as many indie games as possible is about to get very heated. Just like there is still some studio executive who is kicking himself for missing out on The Blair Witch Project's profits, no gaming company wants to be the one who turned down the chance to have the next minecraft aesthetic changes solely on their system. Perhaps more than ever, the power in games belongs to the individual artists.
Someone needs to have a nice sitdown with the gaming industry about VR and what it can and can't do. The ability to transport the viewer inside a scene is incredible, and if that scene happens to be in the cockpit of some kind of ship, then it opens up a whole range of movement options that would otherwise be a bad idea. Putting the player behind the eyes of a protagonist who walks around freely in the standard FPS viewpoint, on the other hand, is something that has only sounded awesome. It's hasn't been. Really, seriously, it's kind of sucked, and while wanting it to be different won't change that, clever viewing systems just might. So now Minecraft has official VR support, and it's taken an interesting approach to the presentation that's a little awkward but usable.
Each path differs in gameplay as Magnus’s path is a lot more action-oriented with the introduction of Boom Town and 'griefers.' Of course, we all know 'griefers' from the original game as annoying players who would blow stuff up. Because of this, QTEs (Quick Time Events) are utilized that were so popular in the previous episode to dodge TNT. Ellegaard’s path isn’t as action oriented and focuses more on puzzles and the character focus from the very first episode. There is a lot more dialogue in this path and a lot of it makes up the funnier aspects of this episode. This episode capitalizes on the voice actors that Telltale has gotten together like Corey Feldman (Magnus), who played Mouth in The Goonies, and Grey Griffin (Ellegaard), famous for playing Daphne Blake in the Scooby-Doo cartoon movies that bring the characters to life.
It wasn't meant to last though, as even though the 32/64 bit era only barely blurred the party lines, with every subsequent gaming generation, it became harder and harder to separate one system from another just by looking at the games on the store shelves. By the time that Peter Moore revealed a "GTA IV" tattoo on his arm at E3, the message was clear that Triple A titles had become too big and too expensive to only commit to one system or another and, outside of some in-house and privately published development teams, the idea of big name exclusives was a dying light in the night drowned out by the dawn of a new day.
If you followed Gamescon this year, you'll have no doubt noticed that the word on the lips of every Microsoft,Sony, and Nintendo representative was "indie." Whether it be Sony revealing that Minecraft, Rogue Legacy, and The Binding of Issac would be part of the PS4 family, Microsoft unveiling a pretty daring new system to encourage indie development, or Nintendo showing that indie developers are fully prepared to make use of the unique capabilities of the Wii U, it became clear that both companies have suddenly realized that indies are no longer a niche market ran by eccentrics and snatched by the gaming version of hipsters, but a viable and exciting source of incredible new ideas, and creative final products.
