Transistor: Marathoned. It was... ok. Good, even. But not nearly as good as Bastion, and unfortunately that is a comparison the developers heavily invited on themselves, advertising and selling the game entirely on the strengths of "from the makers of Bastion! With Logan Cunningham!" etc. In addition to making parts of the game strongly resemble Bastion when they didn't have to, particularly the Backdoor hub area. So it's hard to get away from that when talking about it.
The gameplay at least is very fun and not much like Bastion's, despite appearing similar at first glance. It's more like... I dunno, SRPG DDS, or Frozen Synapse if anyone else played that. There are really two battle systems going on at once, and you can choose to use either or both: A. basic realtime run around and hit things, wherein individual skills have their own cooldowns, and B. the Turn() system, which lets you stop time and queue up a sequence of movement and attacks which you then execute near-instantly. The catch is that coming out of Turn() has a long cooldown during which you can do nothing but walk around.
Turn() is super awesome and fun, lets you constantly feel like you're stopping time and omnislashing crowds to death, or surgical striking certain targets, or whatever you please. It's not the best choice in every situation, though, and your Turn is not *quite* instantaneous or uninterruptible. Certain enemies can teleport away or counterattack even in the middle of a Turn, and lategame opponents have their own Turn system they can use against you - quite dangerous!
The actual skills and attacks you use are... well the system is complicated to explain but not that bad to set up in practice. You have some number of slots for active skills, active skills can have other skills attached to them to modify and boost their effects (like materia links, or Diablo 3 runes), there's a max Memory limit keeping your total abilities in check, and on top of all this your skills are also your party members and using them more unlocks more bios and conversations with them. Quite a lot of builds and customizations are possible, but each individual skill is pretty easy to grasp.
Fights themselves are kind of lacking though, after a while, and while many builds are possible, if you have any amount of basic gaming skill and some rudimentary Turn() strategy it's not hard to hack through everything using whatever you want. Getting "killed" doesn't even kill you, it just disables one of your active skills until the next save point or two. I guess you could die if you ran out of all skills but that seems very difficult to do, I only got skill broken a couple of times across the whole game.
Atmosphere and aesthetics are, of course, the game's other major selling point, and on this point it definitely delivers. Music and visual design are A+++++, the atmosphere is incredible, lots of lavish little touches, very immersive, neat world, general praise. This is where it certainly exceeds Bastion, even. There's even some online integration, you can see ghostly flickers of other players walking around sometimes, and interact with them (sort of) by humming and dancing.
Characters and story though... not... so much. Transistor takes the "start in media res, explain nothing" style of narrative up to 11, and while I respect that style, it does come with some risks and I think the game does run afoul of those. Especially compared to Bastion, which did the same thing but much better. By the end of Bastion, I was emotionally sold on caring about all the characters to some extent, and they all had some depth except for The Kid. By the end of Transistor, I was sold on Red (the protagonist), but... that was about it. She has some depth, but all the other characters are mostly one-note, even the Logan Cunningham Narrator Plot Device Sword.
And, avoiding spoilers, but... that ending... the ending is bad. The depth that Red does have feels like it's concealed from the player and only comes out at the very end, making for a very jarring "wait, what just happened?" conclusion. Bastion offered 2 x2 choices in the endgame, and all options felt real and valid and like the player could "own" their actions, even though there was one clearly encouraged path. Transistor offers no choices at all to the player, Red acts on her own, and the actions she chooses made me seriously reconsider the connection and understanding I had felt with her up until then. This was a big deal to me and had a significant impact on my enjoyment of the game when immediately looking back on it.
Transistor is also short. Very short. Like 4 hours short. I wish it was about 1.5x to 2x as long, both in gameplay and story. There isn't enough meat there to fully explore either the combat ("Oh come on, enemies just started getting Turn()! We're out of the tutorial now, things are just getting interesting!") or the storyline ("Oh, finally, a hint to an actual plot and some explanation - wait it's over?"). Other than the incredible amount of polish on the aesthetics, it feels more like an amateur tech demo than a complete game, like we should be waiting for "Bastion, from the makers of Transistor!" rather than vice versa. There are "limiters," which are like Bastion's challenge idols but less fleshed out. There are challenge rooms for survival and skill training, like Bastion's but less fleshed out (too easy, and they close after beating them once, unlike Bastion's which you could replay endlessly).
It's pretty. It's fun. I certainly don't regret playing Transistor, and taking it on its own it's probably a solid 7/10 or so. But I also can't help but feel disappointed at the amount of unrealized potential, and the constant comparison to Bastion *really* pushes that in your face. Final verdict: a fine game that could and probably should have been more than fine.
