For Honor is a game rife with opportunities to cooperate. The 2 v2 and 1 v 1 modes promote the sort of cooperation made for best friends and siblings. All potential situations featuring rivalries and temporary truces play themselves out in this melee fighter. You can say one thing and do another (to tick off your friend) or you can choose to use your combined might to defeat the enemy without screwing over your key teammate. Anything can happen in these chaotic battlefields, including comic relief both side-splitting funny and unbearably annoying.

12. Inside jokes

A game such as For Honor with an elaborate, over the top, and at times hilarious multiplayer experience lays the perfect foundation for elaborate jokes to spring quicker than swinging swords and poking spears. The jokes emerge in a rush: “Hi-Ya!” and “Got you, you piece of shit!” and “Fuck you, piece of shit!”

The boisterous and violent nature of every combatant prompts personal responses from gamers, even when I cannot detect a voice on the other end of their microphones. A video game where verbal explanations are commonplace, the alternating waves of joy and despair appears encouraged by Ubisoft’s design. The gameplay begs for new experiences to coalesce with every subsequent multiplayer beatdown.

Swinging the Shinobi kurigasama recalls Gogo from Kill Bill to mind but also the notorious and hilarious Master Pain/Better from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist. I defer to Master Betty. His moronic declaration “Swinging the chain, swinging the chain, swinging the chain” connects the game to the movie in hilarious fashion and his above quote is not his only quotable line. “When you girls are done kissing I have some ass kicking for you!” At one point the deep voiced narrator intones: “One thing about iron claws…they hurt like crap, man!”

With such an arsenal of quotes to choose from, every moment is never dull. The charm is lost only when a slice of rage takes hold and threatens to inflict psychological distraction to overwhelm the senses. It happens.

11. Elaborate Taunts

The multiplayer taunts Ubisoft brings to the table allow players to be uncommonly mean to one another, even when placed alongside a sum of today’s multiplayer gaming experiences. The taunts draw the ire of many gamers.

It is common for one jackass gamer to rise victorious playing as the Orochi only to jack off flower petals onto the corpse to add insult to injury. The Raider can perform a similar gesture by mashing the taunt button. If a player can time the presses just right, the character will appear to grab hold of his two handed axe and proceed to flagellate the pole while pelvic thrusting.

I can only imagine what the cornucopia of vicious taunts equating to a kind of contemptuous masturbation does to the patience and psyche of other gamers. At times an opponent will move in an erratic fashion enough to suggest rage. I feel almost obligated to return any rude gesture I can sense because the sadist in me loves these burns after a losing a match and overcoming the next one during a rough game of cheap slaughter and sophomoric behavior. The simulated masturbation at the end can feel wonderful, glorious, cathartic.

Being on the other end of that display, especially after an over-enthusiastic t-bag/wank, makes me feel dead inside and used. My conscious and maturity suffers more in the end to the gushing wounds generated by my opponents.

My brother and I delight in these taunts. We’re brothers and therefore sophomoric by nature while engaged in a mutual fight for survival. It’s all fun and games between the two of us

10. Learning moves

Part of the fun is learning the complexity of moves imbued in every fighter. It’s easy to watch the instructional videos and adapt in the PvE arena before tackling the PvP and think “I can do this. I can kick that next guy’s ass no problem.” This kind of attitude can lead to an overconfidence anyone can exploit.

The true learning emerges during spectator mode after a player’s death. The player learns through close observation of every dip, dodge, duck, and attack/defense. To me, watching my brother’s technique is productive because I improve my own technique while the observation gives me ideas and moves to try out the next time Noah and I face off in a duel.

Spectating Noah allows me to try his established approach with his main characters, Orochi and the Peacekeeper, and mix it up with my own ingenuity and style or lack of.

9. Rage Quit

Rage Quitting occurs on a frequent basis in For Honor. My brother and I have more resilience than the blue-dot jerks on our team in domination and team death match and really just about every other mode. These folks quit out when the difficulty of another player throws the rage gamers off balance.

These jerks often quit out when they see a fight they cannot win without resorting to cheap tactics like knocking opponents off cliffs or throwing players into spiked traps and pitfalls and the like. Quitting leaves incompetent bots behind and the accompanying team suffers a notable decrease in the quality of the overall team or duo.

The real irony comes when the game controlled bots end up possessing better fighting skills than the original blue dot, so their worth becomes apparent at the end of the fight.

Continued...