My Christmas break was longer than expected, thanks to the bad weather, but I’m back home now and catching up on crucial tasks, like changing the look of my Backloggery. While I was away, I finally became the Champion in Pokemon Platinum, started and beat the iPad version of Plants vs. Zombies, picked up a couple of PS2 games in decent condition at Gamestop of all places (a new Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love—it was the last copy and had a beat-up outer box, but the game case itself is sealed— and a used Baroque), got a DS game on sale at Best Buy (Picross 3D), and started Rune Factory 3 and the aforementioned Picross 3D. Upon returning home, yet another new game was added to the pile: Professor Layton and the Curious Village, a Christmas present that I wasn’t able to open until last night. There are other late gifts, but I’m not sure any games will be among them; this might be a good thing, given the current state of my backlog.
DD:
When I wrote last January’s backlog report, twenty-two game cases stood on my desk shelf. Counting Metroid Prime Trilogy as three distinct titles, this meant a total of twenty-five games. This year, there are twenty cases and twenty-one titles—World of Goo is currently sitting, unplayed, on one of my hard drives—but the number of RPGs is as unwieldy as ever. And yes, I still haven’t played Rogue Galaxy.
Speaking of which, there were three other 2009 must plays that I didn’t get around to: Nocturne, Persona 3 FES, and Tales of the Abyss. I did play the others, and, save for Chrono Cross, greatly enjoyed each one of them.
Here are my must-play games for 2010, in no particular order:
• Rogue Galaxy – Because, seriously, this is starting to get ridiculous.
• Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2 – Might start this one later in the week, actually.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2 – It’s been awhile since I’ve dug into a tactical RPG.
• Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Like FFTA2, a game I had intended to play last year.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
• Ratchet and Clank
• Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja
• World of Goo
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
How many of them will I get through, or even just start? Stay tuned.
My annual roundup, where I post brief impressions of all the games I played in the past year will be up shortly. Also, I will start keeping my annual Beaten Games tabs here from now on (I’ve got a post at the CAG forums’ current Completed Games thread I might use, too). As for the old tabs, they will be migrated here along with most all of my other game-related posts from LiveJournal; having seen this past year how ad-heavy that site has gotten, I feel this would be for the best. Anyway, more to come…
The busy holiday season is upon us, and over the past couple of weeks, I have bought half a dozen games—not as gifts, but for myself. So far, I’ve played two of these, and have also beaten one of my older backlogged titles. Instead of doing entire posts for these games, which I was strongly considering for two of them, here are some capsule reviews which hopefully cover the core essence of each title.
What would the real Chopin have thought of Eternal Sonata?
I have a soft spot for games from early on in a console’s life. They’re an interesting glimpse into what developers were thinking back then in regards to a new platform. What are their priorities? How are graphics approached? What holdovers from the previous gen are apparent?
Eternal Sonata is one such game. It was the first major third-party JRPG on the Xbox 360, greeted with much fanfare by followers of the genre. However, it might also be seen as a sign of things to come, as JRPGs have yet to really find their footing on the high-definition consoles (meanwhile, handheld JRPGs are going through what might be termed a golden age, but that’s a topic for another time).
As one would expect from a game inspired by a composer, Eternal Sonata is musically lush, and the voice acting ranks up there with the Tales series in terms of quality. The anime-styled graphics are drop-dead gorgeous, though the animation is merely decent and the environments are more constrained and linear than you would expect. Eternal Sonata also features an engaging battle system that meshes turn-based and action gameplay, with a light and shadow component for special moves that is wholly dependent on the environment. Blocking and counterattacking moves are available, but these require extremely precise timing to pull off, and thus leave much to be desired. One of the characters also has the ability to take photos during battle, but the only thing that this feature is useful for is in amassing large amounts of money (photos can be sold at shops), and feels like a novelty at best, and a wasted opportunity (on the developers’ part) at worst.
Ostensibly, the story is about a dream that famed composer Frederic Chopin has while on his deathbed, and his questioning of this dream’s very nature. However, it is also the story of the heroine, Polka, a terminally ill teenage girl with magical powers. There are a few things in the story that don’t make sense, but thanks to good pacing and solid (if cliched at times) characterization, the game progresses in such a way as to lead one to believe that all will be answered by the end. However, in terms of plotting, the final chapter is a mess, and the ending is long, pretentious, and only led to more questions. The final boss, though startling at first, made sense; unfortunately, its abrupt emergence matched the haphazard tone of the entire ending.
I have only been playing the PC game Audiosurf for a little under a week, and already, it’s my favorite game out of those that I’ve played this year. In fact, I was ready to post about this under Game Love, not Reviews; declare it the greatest music game of all time; and make room for it in my Holy Trifecta of Puzzle Games (Panel de Pon, Puyo Puyo, and Tetris). I don’t know if “quadfecta” is a real word, though.
Audiosurf, like many ingenious works, is simple in both form and function. Essentially, it is what would happen if you took an audio visualizer and mixed it with a match-three puzzle game. Plug in any audio file, and as long as it’s in a supported format, Audiosurf will generate a track out of it, complete with peaks, valleys, and lots of little colored pieces to collect for mad points. There are a handful of different characters to choose from, including a few that allow for two-player games. The Mono characters are the most basic of them all, and a good place to start for beginners; the colored blocks are all the same, and all one has to worry about is dodging the useless grey ones. When playing as one of the others, multiple colored pieces show up on the field at the same time, along with power-ups, and things really start to get hectic.
The graphics settings are quite flexible, plus a handful of optional sound effects are available. There’s also a set of achievements, but what really adds to the fun are the online leaderboards; there’s ones for each individual song that’s played with the game. Pick an obscure enough song and you could be the global champion at it, but of course, the real competition lies in the better-known stuff.
One of the most surprising things about Audiosurf is that it’s making me a better listener. Playing a track in the game, I find myself paying more attention to lyrics, instrumentation, and BPM. Regarding that last thing, some songs, like Michael Jackson’s “Wanna be Startin’ Somethin'” sound slower to me in Audiosurf than they do normally.
All in all, despite an interface that isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing thing ever, plus a tutorial mode that’s rough around the edges, this is an incredible game and a must-have for music lovers. By the way, I’m R. Kasahara on the official site, and if you have any doubts about Audiosurf, go see it in motion.
Here's what my Destroyer and his dog looked by the end of the story.
This is the most recent RPG I beat, and the first WRPG I’ve ever gotten to the end of. Torchlight, available for Windows and Mac OS X, is often described as a Diablo clone, but it’s one whose pedigree includes former staffers at Diablo home Blizzard North. Naturally, Torchlight has some of that Blizzard Touch™ about it, without the full-on robustness of that studio’s regular output. This lack of depth isn’t really a problem, though, since it’s a quality game made on a small scale by a small studio, and a good value at its full price of $20.
The story in Torchlight is pretty bare-bones. There’s mysterious happenings in the mines just outside of the town of Torchlight. You’re an adventurer who has come to town, and soon you find yourself teaming up with a woman named Syl in an effort to unravel the mine’s mysteries. It’s not a particularly deep story, but it gets the job done, and features some challenging moments and a tidy conclusion.
What largely kept me playing were the clean, World of WarCraft-style graphics and the satisfying loot grind. I also liked going in knowing that it was a short game—I like Diablo-esque RPGs but find many of them too long and too big. Oddly enough, in the end, the one game that Torchlight reminded me of most was Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. Shiren is turn-based and a roguelike, but other than that, there’s not much else separating the two: dungeon floors that were just the right size, item limits that were reasonable, the aforementioned story and loot points, the helper character concept, good graphics and music, and above all, plenty of fun to be had. Besides, if you want to play Torchlight in a more hardcore manner, there’s always the harder difficulty settings and permanent death option.
My lazy ass has taken up fanart again, hardcore. I haven’t drawn much in awhile, and needed to get back into it, so I dove into some pieces that I’d left hanging months ago. The three that I’m currently working on are coming along well, so far, and I hope that I can shake off the last remnants of rust from my skills by the end of the month. What are they? Well, all I’ll say at the moment is that they involve Final Fantasy VII (of course) and two games I beat this year.
Having an account (and running a decently-sized group) at deviantART, I see a lot of others’ fanart on a regular basis. However, my favorite bit of recent fanart I saw on a forum; it’s the one to your right, which, via the “Reaction Guys” meme, is an accurate description of what many Devil May Cry fans felt when the Ninja Theory-developed reboot DmC was unveiled at the Tokyo Game Show last month. To whoever drew this very true reaction, I salute you.
Yeah, I don’t like Dante’s new look either. I’m also a bit wary about Ninja Theory taking the helm of this game, which will be the latest in a series which is traditionally action-packed, combo-heavy, and charmingly cheesy. From what I’ve heard about Heavenly Sword, it wasn’t all that, and early impressions of Enslaved have me suspecting that although DmC might have the Hollywood associations that Ninja Theory likes to include in their games, it probably won’t have the Devil May Cry series’ tricky controller gymnastics. So far, the funniest, weirdest, and scariest thing about DmC is how much the “new” Dante resembles the lead developer. Egad.
While DmC makes me sad, the blog Opposable Thumbs makes me happy. It’s one of a very few number of sites sites I’ve added to my daily games-related internet reading this year. I haven’t liked everything I’ve read there so far, but in general, it’s quality. Some recent pieces I would like to recommend are their history of the Civilization series, the much-discussed article on elaborate press goodies, the review of text adventure documentary Get Lamp, and, my favorite of these, a hands-on look at the latest Cabela’s hunting game.
To round things out, here’s some other recent articles, blog posts, etc. that I’ve found interesting. First off, it seems that Stephen Totilo and N’Gai Croal were at it again, asking developers to play their game “Canon Fodder”, the aim of which is to list the ten greatest games of all time. You might recall that I attended the first season panel at PAX East. It seems that PAX Prime 2010’s Season Two brought a lot of its own drama, especially since that stubborn Ocarina of Time was completely removed from the list. Good stuff, and I’m looking forward to Season Three come PAX East 2011 (hopefully). And speaking of PAX East 2011, registration is now open! Unfortunately, the hotel info isn’t up yet, but you can bet we’re booking as soon as it is.
Ian Bogost’s article Persuasive Games: Free Speech is Not a Marketing Plan looks at the recent controversy surrounding the Taliban’s role in the upcoming Medal of Honor game and laments on how easy it was for EA to deal with it. The most relevant bits were quoted in this GameLife post, if you just want a summary. On a lighter, and totally unrelated, note, Gabe’s promo art for Comic Jumper (second post down) is a hilarious—and well drawn!—homage to the horrible but distinctive comic book work of Rob Liefeld.
Finally, some JRPG-related stuff. RPGamer posted a “retroview” of Final Fantasy VII that is honest and fair, though I don’t agree with the reviewer’s take on the field navigation. Meanwhile, Andriasang has posted some interesting and wonderful pics from Japan, namely a comparison between old-style Disgaea sprites and the new Disgaea 4 ones, and a drop-dead-adorable plush of Final Fantasy XIV moogle Kuplu Kopo.
I’m probably never going to play FFXIV, but I must have that moogle.
It’s StarCraft 2 Day! Actually, the UPS man won’t get here with my copy of the Collector’s Edition until later, so I won’t be starting the Southerners in SpaceWings of Liberty campaign until this evening at the earliest. I have much to do in the meantime, anyway. Such as brushing up on StarCraft canon, for starters; I remember the original (“vanilla”) game’s plot pretty clearly, but need to rewatch much of Brood War‘s cutscenes. On the non-StarCraft front, I’ve taken up DDR again, and want to sink more time into Dragon Quest IX.
Ah, DQIX. Originally, the plan was to beat the game before today, but as time went on, I realized that this would be an impossibility. I’m currently some forty hours in and (by my own rough estimate) a bit of a ways from the end—not because of any steep difficulty or lengthy story, but due to the fact that there’s so much to do in between main quests.
The central story revolves around the player hero character, this time an angel—sorry, Celestrian—who gathers the thanks of earthly mortals to feed the Yggdrasil Tree. Something bad happens, and the quest starts in earnest. The bare-bones plot moves forward by means of smaller, compact stories that occur in each new town the hero visits. Naturally, this bite-size approach to questing is ideal for lots of side-questing and other distractions. One of these is the Alchemy Pot, a modern-day Dragon Quest mainstay which is used to fuse multiple items into new ones that are stronger, rarer, or just all around better than what they were before. New to the series is a job/class system, reminiscent of—but not entirely comparable to—the ones in certain Final Fantasy games.
The job system is only one indicator of how different this Dragon Quest is from its predecessors. The look of the hero is entirely customizable. There’s also the other party members, none of which have the distinct names and personalities of the past, and can either be randomly generated or created from scratch. In terms of the world, the Goddess has been replaced with a male Almighty, and the abstract religious symbols typically seen in the series are different in most places. All enemies are visible when walking across the field, and in dungeons. Certain things have been tweaked easier, though the overall difficulty feels about the same as ever. Much has already been written about the ad-hoc multiplayer features and the platform that its on (it’s worth noting that nearly the entire game can be controlled with the touchscreen, which, incidentally, is how I’ve been playing it). It’s no wonder that, in Jamin Smith’s review at VideoGamer.com, he felt the game was more like a spinoff than a true main-series entry.
However, despite all of change DQIX has brought with it, two hallmarks of the series shine throughout: its aesthetics, and its quality. There is no mistaking this as anything but a mainline Dragon Quest, with all its Koichi Sugiyama musical stylings Akira Toriyama visuals, and much more care and polish than any of the (still great) spinoffs get. The controls are intuitive and, though the menu arrows could be a little larger for those of us using the stylus, sensible. The graphics and sound are among the very best on the DS. The game itself is diverse, easy to play on-the-go, and addictive. On top of all that, all of the new stuff (at least that which I’ve dealt with so far) is well done, and much of it enhances the overall experience; the visible enemies is one feature I would love to see in all future entries. This is a Dragon Quest for today, a JRPG for those who doubt the viability of the genre in a time when WRPGs have stormed consoles like FPSes did before them. It makes me want to play more, and also to wonder what a Dragon Quest MMO would be like.
It’s going to be really hard to juggle this and StarCraft 2.
I’ve been back for awhile now, but have been either too lazy, busy, or tired to update this place. I did, however, post at my CAG blog; there, I shared a whole set of photos from the Dragon Quest IX launch event that took place a little over a week ago at Manhattan’s Nintendo World Store. There were lots of people, demo stations, freebies, and frozen treats from a Dragon Quest-themed Mister Softee truck.
This slime is almost as big as my backlog!
Funnily enough, although I got DQIX a day early, I didn’t actually start playing the damned thing until the following Monday. I’ve played quite a bit of it since then, though. It’s an unusual game for the franchise, in terms of how it breaks with tradition, though I don’t have anything bad to say about it so far. I do wish the dungeon designs were more puzzle-intensive, along the lines of certain ones in earlier Dragon Quest games, but that sort of thing doesn’t seem to be Level-5’s strong suit. This game also seems to have eased the difficulty in certain subtle ways, which I feel ambivalent about. On the other hand, a feature that I really like reminds me of one of Earthbound‘s best: enemies—which are all now visible on the field—are likely to run away from your party if you’re too strong.
I’ve also made a lot of progress in Pokemon Platinum. Actually, that was the only game I played on the trip, which means Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes has been relegated to the backlog for the time being. Later, I put Platinum down upon starting DQIX, then picked it up again this weekend. I’m currently up to five gym badges and am beefing up my team before taking on Pokemon Gym #6 (not its real name).
Along with the DS RPGs, I’ve been plugging away at Kirby Super Star, but I don’t know when I’ll beat it, though I’m very close to being done with everything, save the minigames, which I’ve mostly ignored. And then there’s StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, which will arrive here in less than ten days in all its Collector’s Edition glory. Right now the plan is to beat DQIX before SC2 gets here, which will leave my August free for a super-long, and super-shiny, Terran campaign, plus some possible multiplayer and/or modding.
Oh, and my birthday happened. One of the presents I received was an Amazon gift card, which was spent in part on a used copy of Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, an Atlus-published roguelike I’ve had my eye on. It’s now in the backlog pile, along with Clash of Heroes. Plus, I preordered Etrian Odyssey III, which is due out in September, since I had to have that artbook.
Every year, gamers complain about the “drought” that happens in the summer. Pssh. Even without Dragon Quest IX and StarCraft 2, I would be overwhelmed; there’s just so much in my backlog, and so much more I haven’t even picked up yet, like late-winter and spring releases Bayonetta, Nier, and Super Mario Galaxy 2. Come the fall, while my husband is consumed by Civilization V and World of WarCraft: Cataclysm, there will be the aforementioned Etrian Odyssey III, along with Rune Factory 3 and, if it turns out to be any good, Front Mission Evolved. Then there’s the “epic” games that I will not get right away but will likely pick up sometime, namely Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Disney Epic Mickey.
As I did with Earthbound last year, I’m compelled to go in-depth with my Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride review, so I’m splitting this into two sections. The first will discuss the game overall, spoiler-free. The second will go heavily into spoiler territory and talk about things I both liked and didn’t like with how the game progressed. Spoilers will be under a cut and clearly marked (at least, better marked than they were in the Earthbound review, cut notwithstanding). So, here we go.
Dragon Quest V is wonderful. There isn’t really much more to say about it than that. It takes the refined formula that characterizes the series and stitches to it a story that outshines and outclasses most other JRPG tales, along with a handful of unique features and engaging diversions. The Dragon Quest formula, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a certain style of first-person turn-based fighting, combined with interesting dungeons, lively towns and castles, casino minigames, and a reasonable amount of grinding, all presented in a brightly-colored Akira Toriyama world set to a serene Koichi Sugiyama soundtrack. It’s a world with blue slimes with round eyes and goofy smiles, lamps that can turn day into night, and mini-medals sought after by an eccentric king. If you’re at all familiar with Dragon Quest, then you know what I’m talking about and should feel right at home.
One of the major features specific to Dragon Quest V is the ability to recruit monsters as party members. This isn’t as clear-cut as it sounds. Unlike in monster-collecting RPGs like Pokemon, the player doesn’t have any control over the recruiting process; there’s no special spells or items that can be used to convince them to join your side. Rather, at the end of battles, a monster might randomly show up and ask to join your party. This happens pretty rarely and, as one learns after obtaining the Big Book of Beasts, not all monsters are recruitable, and some are harder to enlist than others. All told, I don’t think I recruited much more than a dozen monsters, but that was okay, as I wound up with a pretty solid all-monster backup team by the time the final dungeon came around, including a Slime Knight that had been with me for a good majority of the game.
"Yo dawg I herd you like Dragon Quest..."Another way in which Dragon Quest V differentiates itself is with its diversions. The usual casino games (slots, roulette, etc.) are present, as is the sidequest wherein mini-medals, which are scattered all over the world, can be exchanged for rare goodies, but there are some new things to do as well. One of my favorites is Treasures and Trapdoors, or T’n’T for short. T’n’T is a giant, life-size board game played with a die and a set number of turns; the spaces along the board contain anything from an additional turn or three to a random battle, a treasure chest to an inn, a dungeon entrance to a stat boost. It’s sort of like playing a scaled-down version of Dragon Quest within Dragon Quest. The prizes for winning a round of T’n’T are good, and later on, playing certain boards can be a great way to amass a lot of cash without having to dungeon-crawl in the traditional sense. Another I liked is the Knick-Knackatory, a museum where the “knick-knacks” that the hero collects on his journey can be displayed. I never did get all of the knickknacks, but I came pretty close, and it was neat to see the museum slowly fill up over time, both with exhibits and with visitors.
As for Dragon Quest V‘s story, like I said, I really do believe it is one of the best ever in a JRPG, and in large part, this is due to its structure and approach. For instance, while there is backstory, and a fair amount of it—this being the second part of the Zenithian Trilogy, the events of Dragon Quest IV are very vaguely alluded to, but there are other bits of history, specific to DQV, that factor in as well—there is no need for flashbacks on the part of the hero, as we see every important thing that happens in his life right then and there, in whatever the present happens to be at the time. From hereon in, I’ll call the “hero” Kiyoshi, as that’s what I named mine; like all Dragon Quest heroes, he is nameless until the player intervenes.
The game starts with Kiyoshi’s birth, and quickly jumps forward six years when he is wandering the world with his father, Pankraz. Who Pankraz and Kiyoshi are and what the former’s quest is are major plot points in the game, and ones that follow our hero through the years. We follow the six year-old on his adventures, and after another timeskip, see him again as a teenager, growing into a young man. He has more adventures, learns more about himself, and chooses a bride. The quest he embarks with his wife continues on from there, and his life, as all our lives do, grows larger and larger.
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