Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Ni No Kuni is an RPG that dared to exist, ridden with flaws but somehow coming out a worthwhile experience.  The game was originally released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS in Japan with the subtitle "The Jet-Black Mage."  It told the story of Oliver, our small and frustratingly goody-goody protagonist, who travels to a parallel world after accidentally causing the death of his mother.  In this alternate world, many citizens have been rendered walking vegetables by having their emotions sucked out.  Since the developers had totally never played Kingdom Hearts, they call these folks the Heartbroken.  Our hero must face the wizard behind it all, Shadar, who happens to also be holding the soul of Oliver's mother's alternate self.  It's a good motivation that I think does well in justifying why a little kid would go through all the trouble.  He cares as much about bringing his mother back to life in whatever way possible as he does saving the people of the world.  In the DS version, the story ends after Oliver deals with Shadar.  It's a logical, completed story with some heartwarming moments. Level 5 and Studio Ghibli both worked on this game, and aesthetically it's absolutely breathtaking.  The game looks and sounds like a Ghibli film down to nearly every detail, and the quality never drops.  Joe Hisaishi's music, while certainly not his best effort, fits the trailblazing spirit of the game well.  I never had any complaints about Ni No Kuni from the audio-visual front.

Unfortunately, when the game was re-released for the Playstation 3 as Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, a second layer of the plot got slapped on: after defeating Shadar, Oliver must save the world again from the true villain behind it all, a witch who supposedly has a god-given ability to decide the world's fate. Outside of Japan, this is the only version we got, and oh boy does it sour the experience.  This section is completely disconnected from the main story, and every scene involving the White Witch throughout the game feels tacked on and generic.  Call it padding, DLC, or whatever you like.  At the end of the game, I wished that the story had been allowed to end at its natural stopping point.  While I have my issues with the original ending, at least the final hours of the game didn't involve developing a new character nobody cared about.  George Lucas may have botched up Star Wars over the years, but he didn't add a brand new subplot at the end of any of the films.  

At its heart, Ni No Kuni is supposed to be a big, epic adventure in a mysterious world.  The game accomplishes making the player feel this sometimes, but falls flat quite a bit.  One great moment stands out in particular for me: gaining the ability to fly around on a dragon.  When I first took off and heard the brassy, triumphant remix of the world map theme, I almost shed a tear.  It was as if the game was finally letting me do the exploration I wanted to.  What's more, flying is like flying the airship in Final Fantasy VI.  In so many modern RPGs, airships have just become menus that transport you from one place to another.  Finally, I was able to fly around in one of these modern, humongous worlds like I flew around in RPGs from my childhood. The novelty never wore off, either--I would fly from place to place just to experience doing so at times, even though I had the ability to teleport.  When Ni No Kuni stops holding your hand and feeding you tutorials, which isn't very often, it's honestly perfection.  I loved exploring new areas in the world, discovering items with Oliver's spells, and facing new monsters in strange areas.  Sadly, these moments don't last as the game's world is smaller than it initially appears, but I savored in them as the game unfurled itself.

The main puzzle gimmick in the game is Oliver's magic.  Like in the Golden Sun games, you get a variety of spells that can be used on the map to move statues, burn stuff down, and so on.  This would have been a great feature, except it's lazily implemented and doesn't trust the player to do things on his own.  One of the only good things about Golden Sun was how the map magic worked: you cast the spell, Isaac performed it, you saw the animation, stuff happened.  In Ni No Kuni, you select the spell from a menu, Oliver sits there, no animation usually happens, the screen fades out, and the thing you needed done is done.  It reminded me of working on games with the OHRRPGCE.  Before implementing animations, I'd do a similar fade out routine.  It was meant to be lazy, or a placeholder.  When I cared about making it look good, I'd go through some trouble to do so.  Therefore, it bothers me that Level 5 didn't go through the same trouble.  Oliver's character model had the casting animations from the battle system, so why couldn't he at least look like he was doing something?  Of course, the larger issue is that the game never lets the player solve these puzzles. Your ridiculously annoying fairy companion, Drippy, tells you precisely what spell to use at every roadblock. At this point, I'm almost desensitized to these things happening in games, but it's never going to stop stinging. Challenge me a little, game!

Ni No Kuni's battle system is a mixed bag.  On one hand, it's the real-time action monster battle RPG system Pokémon fans have always dreamed of.  On the other, it almost seems like less work went in to the battles than every other aspect of the game.  The most satisfying quality of the battles is that they are usually simple enough to finish.  Attacking random mobs head on is often a good idea, and finishes them off quickly enough; you'll want to, as the game has way too many random enemies on the maps for its own good, many of them near unavoidable.  The problem is when the system tries to go deeper.  When I noticed how difficult it was to toggle between action commands while moving around and paying attention, I knew I was in for trouble.  In fact, one of the reasons spamming attacks is so good is that selecting from menus is so annoying. The monsters (familiars) that the game gives you, first of all, are basically just three or four types of fighters with different models.  You have your tank attackers, glass cannons, pure tanks, and magicians.  None of the familiars I collected had any unique abilities or special traits.  This is a problem with the game that doesn't become evident until very late in to it.  Unfortunately, it also means that familiars can effectively be distilled down to just the mathematical best choices.  There's no reason to use Familiar A over Familiar B if Familiar A has the same role but worse stats.  For all its faults, Pokémon at least does a good job making the various monsters have unique abilities and moves.  It's a big shame that Ni No Kuni couldn't do the same since the Ghibli art direction makes the monsters look so great.

However, the biggest problem with Ni No Kuni's battle system, and honestly the game as whole, is the ally AI.  Eventually, Oliver will have two party members with three familiars each and it's up to the AI to control them.  The AI doesn't know how to control them.  It tends to throw out the familiar with the highest stat total without any regard to its function in the battle.  I can't count the number of times I wanted the AI to attack, but it sent out a healer and started chipping away instead of using the heavy hitter I had worked so hard to obtain and prepare for battle.  The AI also loves burning through MP.  It will waste loads of MP on spells against weak enemies, or use a healing spell when you take just a scratch of damage. Buffs get used essentially at random. It got to the point where I wanted to just have Oliver solo the entire game, but that's not feasible when your familiar is up against mobs of three enemies until very late in.  You will have to rely on the crappy AI and learn its quirks to finish this game, and it is definitely the one thing, despite every other complaint I have, that prevents me from recommending Ni No Kuni to everyone.

While the battle system is deeply flawed, I should mention that apart from the whole White Witch thing, I think Ni No Kuni's story is well-handled.  As one would expect from a Ghibli production, the world's very whimsical and doesn't get dark in a way that feels unnecessary or grotesque.  For the most part, it's a feel-good adventure.  I like to play games like this from time to time; it's one of the reasons I turn to Dragon Quest so much.  The game has several mysteries involving characters, too.  While it spells them out eventually, it was fun to try and piece them together as the game went on.  I guessed who Shadar really was, but was happy when I learned I was correct.  The story has Oliver return to the real world from time to time, sometimes to figure out what the alternate version of a character is having problems with or to interact with a few of Oliver's real friends. I liked these sections and felt they added a lot to the mythology of the game's universe. I do wish it went all the way and gave Motorville (the city Oliver lives in) some kind of resolution by the end of the game, though.  In fact, until halfway through the game, I (and my friend SDHawk apparently) thought that the alternate world was a figment of Oliver's imagination and he was playing pretend to cope with his mother's death. I'm okay with the game not going that route, but it did feel like a major ball was dropped with regards to Motorville.  Maybe if Oliver had met more parallel versions of characters, it would have felt better fleshed-out.

Oddly, I think my favorite aspect of the game is its sidequests.  The quests themselves are mostly brain-dead: deliver an item, find something on the map, repair people's hearts, catch these familiars, and so on.  Nothing you couldn't think of without playing the game first.  What makes the quests good is that you get rewarded very well for doing them.  The game gives you merit rewards that can be bought after doing lots of quests which do things like increase walking speed, cut the cost of spells in half, increase experience gain, and make familiars easier to catch.  All of these things are simple, but they are nice rewards for the effort you put in. The more subtle benefit of quests is that they make a great substitute for grinding.  Ni No Kuni's difficulty spikes quite a bit in several areas, but as long as you keep up with the sidequests, you won't have too much trouble. I am glad more and more RPGs are using quests in this way, as it helps the player feel like his efforts are worth it no matter how trivial they seem.

Ultimately, Ni No Kuni is a fresh, original RPG that came out when we really needed one.  It has a multitude of problems, but it's a game that deserves to exist and I'm very glad that I played it.  The problems I have are problems I mention because I enjoyed the game and wished those things were fixed before release or avoided entirely in some cases.  You could say that that Ni No Kuni is a strange sort of "licensed" game, where a studio that doesn't make games came in to work with a studio that does.  If this is the kind of quality we can expect from future licensed games, I'd be perfectly okay with it.  My hope is that Level 5 recognizes the mistakes they made in this game's development and improves in the future.  I cannot recommend Ni No Kuni unless the idea of a Ghibli adventure in RPG form with monster collection already appeals to you, but if it does, I think you'll enjoy most of the game; it's not perfect, but it's the kind of game I would have loved to play in my childhood.

7

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

Oracle of Ages is part of a set of two games released in 2001 for the Game Boy Color.  These two Zelda titles were developed by Capcom instead of Nintendo's normal Zelda team.  This shows, as the more finicky puzzle design and focus on throwing in lots of powerful enemies differ wildly from what one expects to see in the Zelda series.  As a result, the Oracle games feel fairly distinct from other Zelda games, which isn't a bad thing, but it still feels like something is missing.  I guess I just like Zelda games to focus more on exploration than combat, but that's an entirely subjective matter.  I respect what Capcom was going for with the Oracle games.  They wanted to make two Zelda games with a similar vibe but enough differences to feel distinct from one another.  I think they succeeded for the most part, but with the benefit of hindsight, Oracle of Ages doesn't hold up as well as its brother.

The primary difference between the two games, aside from the aesthetic of time travel vs. changing of the seasons is that Ages focuses more on the plot and villain (Veran, who has a pretty cool design, mind) while Seasons really focuses on the gameplay.  This makes a whole lot of sense when you consider that the two N64 Zelda games were about time travel.  Ages wants to be a game that fans of the 3D games will enjoy while Seasons is aimed at lovers of classic Zelda. What holds Ages back in that respect is that the plot's a generic Saturday morning cartoon story: bad guy possesses the girl, you separate the girl from the bad guy, you kill the bad guy.  There's nothing wrong with it, but it's hard to get excited about the new characters and their extended story scenes when you know how it's going to end from the very beginning.

Perhaps more problematic is the fact that Link's quest to get eight Macguffins feels unrelated to the rest of the story.  In the end, the Macguffins are used to show which door of the Black Tower is not an illusion.  It's necessary to finish the game, but it's a major letdown that the entire length of the game was spent essentially solving the equivalent of a single puzzle in a dungeon.  This is entirely transparent: Capcom made up a flimsy excuse for Link to have to travel to eight dungeons. See, it worked in The Legend of Zelda because assembling the Triforce was needed to hurt Ganon.   It worked in Link to the Past because the seven maidens were characters you might have cared about saving. The Macguffins in this game are just "essences of time" that magically make a door reveal itself.  There is no connection between those two things, and it ruins the illusion of narrative that the game tries to set up.  I normally don't nitpick about story in games like this because it's usually not my biggest concern, but I feel like this one is especially hacked together and dumb.

For the most part, the gameplay holds up.  The usual Zelda trappings are there, and they work as well as in any of the other games.  The seeds with different effects are a great upgrade from Link's Awakening's magic powder.  While the Mermaid Suit is hard to control, I like the idea of Link having more freedom in water sections.  The Roc's Feather is always always always a welcome addition, though it's a lot better in Seasons and Minish Cap than in this game.  I did not like how the animal buddies were so underused in Ages, but they were a cool idea nonetheless.  To top it off, the Cane of Somaria (which creates a block) returns in this game, which is probably only second to the Roc's Feather as my favorite Zelda item.  All of the items are used well throughout the game's eight dungeons and overworld.  If it weren't for bad design decisions in other aspects, I'd say the gameplay is just right.

But of course, there are some really questionable design decisions, and they all basically boil down to tedium. The game has two very painful fetch-quest missions.  One involves gathering all of your items on the Tokay Island early in the game.  I like segments where the hero loses his equipment and has to gather it back, but I didn't care for having to trade one for another over and over to enter different parts of the island.  This added a lot of padding to that section of the game that felt hugely artificial.  Later in the game, the player has to solve an elaborate fetch quest chain in the Goron village, which is surprisingly labyrinthine in its design.  I seriously burnt about a week getting through this place on my most recent playthrough, mostly because I got tired of backtracking across the mountains.  The seventh dungeon, Jabu Jabu's Belly, is atrociously designed in a similar manner.  Link has to adjust the water level of the dungeon and traverse sections in different depths. This wouldn't be so bad if the dungeon felt streamlined, but I found myself changing the water setting over and over again, which requires backtracking to a very far corner of the place.  It is needlessly complicated and frustrating, and it's probably the worst water-related dungeon in the entire Zelda series. This is a quite a feat, by the way.

The most tedious aspect of the game is the time travel, though.  Warping between the two eras is basically like warping between the Light and Dark world of Link to the Past since the game only rarely allows you to change something in the past that affects the future.  This saps away most of the fun involved in a game about time travel.  Almost all of the puzzles involving jumping through time are just used to help you get to parts of the map you couldn't reach before.  I was left wanting more, and was even more disappointed that the final dungeon and boss had nothing to do with time travel either.

Oracle of Ages is fun in most of the same ways that Link's Awakening is, but I still think Link's Awakening is a more tightly constructed game.  All of the sections in that game felt like they had a purpose, while Ages feels like it has dungeons and stuff just because it has to.  It's worth a playthrough or several, but it's lacking a cohesive sense of design that would make me put it above most of the other Zelda games.  If you're looking for a Zelda game about time travel, Majora's Mask is the one for you, not this. Of course, Oracle of Seasons is quite a bit more fun and you'll probably want to play the two games together, so if you plan on doing that, Ages is a must-play.  Still, I have to recommend playing with a guide in the tedious sections I outlined above just to save yourself a lot of unneeded frustration.

6

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Wind Waker was, at one time, in my top three Zelda games. I still love the idea of a game about exploration, treasure charts and sailing. Wind Waker looks and sounds great, and it has a cast of fun characters that are sadly done a disservice by some bad decisions by the game’s developers.

Nintendo could have made this game a masterpiece. When I first played it back at release, I thought it was amazing. Well, the novelty’s worn pretty thin at this point. Maybe it’s just the least replayable Zelda game, maybe I’m getting old, I don’t know. Wind Waker has some glaring flaws that truly hold it back, and at this point I have to say it’s one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever wrapped my head around.

I have always adamantly defended the sailing portions of this game, and I still do even though I’ll admit they aren’t that exciting anymore. Normally, I despise slow travel in games, but in Wind Waker the nature of the Great Sea makes it work. The game feels more vast and epic because travel takes such a long time. Here’s the thing, though: exploration in Wind Waker, while it’s the focus of the game, is entirely unrewarding. This ruins the game’s shining promise.

I’ll get back to that point, but to elaborate on it properly, I have to point out other things. First. Wind Waker is an easy game. You can beat it with three hearts without trying too hard. Granted, that’s difficult because the game throws heart pieces at you just for opening the mail. The game requires thousands of rupees to finish, but these are quite easily obtained. In fact, they’re too easily obtained: you’ll curse every orange rupee handed to you like candy before the wallet upgrades once you realize how much money’s needed.

One of the stupidest design decisions that comes to mind is how easily the game throws upgrades at you. As soon as you get Bombs, you can immediately get the 99 Bomb upgrade. The wallet upgrades are available with no fuss whatsoever (Maybe this is a good thing given my earlier complaint). You get the fire and ice arrows at the same time, which pretty much immediately hand you the Iron Boots and Gold Bracer. This goes on and on. Wind Waker hands you all of the important items on a silver platter. As long as you stopped and got chart information for each island along the way, you can’t miss any of it. This is problematic because the only things left are things you don’t actually need: Heart Pieces, Treasure charts, extra Rupees, the Magic Armor, and so on.

Hence, exploration is totally pointless. You gain nothing of value by doing it. Why get Heart Pieces when the game’s final boss can’t even put up a fight? Some players complain about the Triforce gathering section. I disagree; this is actually the best part of the entire game because it requires you to explore in order to progress. Just imagine if the entire game had been based on following charts to dungeons containing the Triforce pieces. That would have been way better than what we got!

It’s clear that Wind Waker was hampered by development problems. Items that should have come from dungeons are easily obtained. Most islands are too small, often filling in a bunch of stuff in to one space. Just the tiny amount of islands with more content than a heart piece chest proves the developers didn’t have time to expand on the world, and that’s sad. Since Wind Waker has such a fresh look and feel, improved combat, and an attempt at a plot that could have been more entertaining with less filler, the lost potential here hurts something awful.

The last thing I have to harp on is the beginning of the game. Skyward Sword’s beginning was awful too, but Wind Waker started this trend in the series. The first thirty minutes of the game are spent on Outset Island with pretty much no interesting gameplay going on. It’s just too long. The intro is overlong, the text boxes scroll slowly, and nothing happens until the Forsaken Fortress. Making matters worse, said Fortress is the worst dungeon in the game, and it can take an hour or more if you happen to get caught by the Moblins multiple times. Stealth could work in a Zelda title, but here it’s implemented in the worst way possible. Metal Gear Solid doesn’t handle stealth perfectly, but geez, at least Snake could hide in lockers, camouflage himself, or stun occasional enemies. In Wind Waker’s stealth section, all you have to rely on are barrels, and those don’t even work that well as the Moblins seem to detect motion way too easily.

Wind Waker has lots of good ideas. It’s not really a bad game. it is a mess, though, and unlike Majora’s Mask, it’s not a FUN mess. Wind Waker is an interesting game punctuated by some of the worst moments in the series’ history. I wish we could go back to 2002 and give Nintendo another year to work on it.

6.5

Soma Bringer

When I started playing Soma Bringer, I was upset that it never saw an English release. Soma Bringer is an obvious precursor to Xenoblade Chronicles, containing many of the same gameplay mechanics, especially involving equipment upgrades and a pseudo-MMORPG style.  The music, composed by my favorite game musician Yasunori Mitsuda, is pretty excellent as one expects from the guy.  At first, I was loving the dungeon-crawlingDiablo-type gameplay, slightly intrigued by the story and expecting great things. 

Sadly, my enjoyment of the game tuned out to be short-lived.

Xenoblade took a mercifully long time getting to the stereotypical anime awful story tropes (by which point I didn’t mind them), but Soma Bringer only takes an hour before you have to deal with an amnesiac mystery girl with Mary Sue magical abilities.  This worked fine inFinal Fantasy VI when we didn’t know any better, but now it’s just hackneyed and frustrating.  In fact, the titular Soma is essentially Magitek or Mako energy all over again: energy from the planet or some mystical origin that men are abusing and now it’s lashing out.  Like I said, I used to accept the reuse of these tropes because they weren’t always being shoved in my face and there were plenty of other story elements distracting from them.  In Soma Bringer, the game is so linearly focused on its core plot (not unlike Radiant Historia) that you simply cannot escape feelings of deja vu, from the Soma to the girl to the cast of other heroes who look suspiciously like characters you’ve seen before (just look at that box art).

That said, I can ignore my problems with the story if the game keeps up the goods, but it does not.  You are clearly intended to play Soma Bringer with friends, but good luck finding someone with the game, especially on an emulator (spoiler: you can’t).  As a solo player, you get to control one of eight characters and pick a class for them.  Two AI teammates will follow you around, but you cannot customize any of their equipment and AI priorities.  In fact, you can’t heal them and can barely interact at all.  This is unbelievably frustrating in the middle of a boss battle: in basically any other RPG, you can chuck a potion at someone who’s dying, but no, not this one.  I understand wanting to have each player be self-sufficient, but there really should have been better options for solo players.

The dungeon design is just huge maps with twists and turns and treasure that will (in my experience) only be usable for classes you’re not playing as.  There’s simply no motivation in going down a long corridor to open a chest when it has a sword and I’m playing as an archer.  This could have easily been fixed by allowing me to customize my AI partners, but… well, you see my point.  Soma Bringer’s problems feed in to each other, and after two large sections of the game, nothing changes about this.

It is now clear to me why Soma Bringer did not get localized.  In order to be fun, it must be played with friends, and Americans simply don’t typically live in as dense a population of RPG enthusiasts.  The same problem applies to Dragon Quest IX, although it was at least a weak-ish Dragon Quest game without buddies tagging along.  Give this game a pass if you’ve been considering it.   I’m sad that Mitsuda’s music was wasted on a poorly thought-out game like this, and surprised Monolith Soft fell in so many avoidable pitfalls.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

Recettear is not the game I expected it to be, and I say that because it hurts the experience. What initially attracted me to this title was its shared concept with Chapter 3 of Dragon Quest IV. For those unaware, this chapter is spent raising money to purchase a store rather than rescuing anyone, and the hero of it (Torneko) is a fat merchant instead of a traditional RPG fighter. Chapter 3 was always one of my favorite parts of that game, not because it broke formula, but because the twist served the larger game’s narrative. Everything advances like the rest of the game has; the player just has an abnormal short-term goal. You also develop better methods of gaining money as the chapter progresses, and because it is a brief section, Torneko’s tale comes off as a lighthearted peek from behind the other side of the shop counter, adding a sense of depth to the often questionable economics of RPGs.

Dragon Quest IV was released in the early 1990s, and its system’s limitations prevented Yuji Hori from taking the concept too far. Flashing forward to 2010, the developers ofRecettear had the opportunity to make an interesting RPG/shop-keeping simulation hybrid, but the end result just feels like an offline MMORPG. The game promises that you’ll learn how to approach various types of customers, your haggling will have a mathematical method to it that you must master, and the side dungeon content will help to expand your shop’s repertoire. In theory, the idea of the shop-keeping taking the wheel and dungeons being off to the side is a good one, but I don’t care for its implementation. The dungeon section feels like a pointless grind, and yet it’s the more exciting part of the game, simply because managing the shop is not very thrilling.

I suppose one could argue that’s realistic, but effectively the game promises depth in the store management and delivers on very little. Characters come in to buy things, but don’t show much consistency in their habits beyond ‘little girls only buy cheap things’–the promise of adjusting to customers’ spending habits and learning to sell to them is thus a lie, at least if my experience with the game says anything. The game tries to mix off the uniformity of items by having certain types ‘trend’ in popularity over time, but really this has the opposite effect of highlighting how otherwise similar items are. There is no point in building a shop geared toward a certain thing, and since (as far as I was able to tell) the available dungeons get maxed out early on, there is also no point stocking up on a variety of arms. A game like Recettear could be something fantastic, but Recettear does not try to be. It’s content being a shallow numbers game with a mediocre RPG attached and ‘moe’ graphics to attract an audience without offering them something of any real quality. The game makes for an entertaining time waster, but with no aspirations of being anything better.

5.5

Little King's Story

Truly, this is one of the greatest tragedies in recent gaming history. Like most of the ill-fated studio Cing’s titles, Little King’s Story has been dying in reduced-price purgatory basically since its release. It’s a game that was advertised to the wrong market and released on the wrong system. The crowd that regularly buys stuff like Fat Princess and Katamari Damacy would have eaten LKS up and been the better for it, but instead this came out for the Wii, giving it the unfortunate ‘for kids’ label commonly associated with Nintendo’s consoles. Even worse, the game’s slightly mature sense of humor branded it with a “teen” rating, meaning it became off limits for the younger kids, and I could go on but you get the drift. None of that’s actually important.

What’s important is that Little King’s Story is one of my favorite video games (as in top 10) and it deserves the praise most reviewers have given it. LKS is a Pikmin-style real-time strategy game that takes place in a small kingdom called Alpoko ruled by the main character. You begin with only a few subjects, and must spread out to conquer the surrounding lands, eventually dominating the entire world. All of this is accomplished through tons of exploration, experimentation, and hilarious surreal boss fights.

If i had to pin Little King’s Story to a genre of literature, it would be fairy tales. While the game has a whimsical, often very silly tone, it can reach in to areas of darkness when needed–the final section of the game feels very sad and realistic, and the revelations gained feel deserved. This, combined with the game’s charming pastel graphics (the only game I can really compare it to visually is Yoshi’s Island) and excellent classically influenced score by Yutaka Minobe make Little King’s Story truly come alive, almost like a Disney or Ghibli film. It doesn’t shy away from some more mature themes either. You essentially play as a dictator in the game (who collects a harem of ‘wives’ to boot), and your subjects will openly criticize your actions. Several times throughout the game, I questioned the validity of the king’s actions, especially when facing the other kings and conquering their lands.

Little King’s Story mostly uses a cast of flat characters, but the way they are presented makes them memorable. The bosses (these are the ones you’ll care about) all get a short but sweet cutscene before their battles begin, and each has its own unique gimmick that you will have to adjust to. For instance, the indescribable TV Dinah quizzes you on geography, then drops bombs on your party and forces you to duel him in a spaghetti western scenario (he’s flipping channels and changing forms with them). One of the bosses is a raving drunkard, and one turns the game in to a giant pinball set. Part of what makes these stand out is that despite not testing you on the game’s actual gameplay mechanics, none of them feel out of place in the game’s world. In fact, by not forcing the player to play as he normally would, the game stays fresh throughout.

Perhaps the best handled aspect of Little King’s Story is its emphasis on exploration. To build new houses and recruit new types of units, you must clear enemies out of new areas, then start digging and building houses. All of this is handled by different units that travel with the king, so it’s a relatively quick process. The sidequests in the game encourage deeper exploration in various areas (even in places you have previously conquered) so the player becomes very familiar with his kingdom by the game’s end. All of this proves to be very important when the world faces an external threat in the story’s climax. I remember the horror I felt when places I had spent so long settling and developing faced epic peril in the final phase of the game. One of the things I always hear people complain about in RPGs is that they don’t care about the world because its citizens are bland. Well, that won’t happen in Little King’s Story. When a game makes you care about the geography itself, I think it’s accomplished something.

Almost every gamer who participated in the last console generation owns a Wii that is now collecting dust, and I would have to recommend Little King’s Story to those in that situation. It’s about a 40 hour game, but none of that really feels wasted, as the game directly rewards even random-seeming exploration and one silly boss fight makes for a great session. Take over the world; you won’t regret it.

9.5

Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Virtue’s Last Reward (VLW) picks up a year after Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors(999) left off.  While I think it is possible to follow the plot without having played the first game, you shouldn’t.  Characters return, concepts are revisited, and the story looks geared for a third and final installment, so if you have any interest in the series, don’t start it here.  999 was one of my favorite visual novels, so I knew going in that I was going to love this game.  I did.  Heck, my wife even got in to the parts of the story she watched and expressed some interest in the genre.  If a visual novel can pull off hooking in a non-gamer, it has to be doing something right.

VLW tells the story of Sigma, a young student who gets kidnapped by a mysterious figure in a gas mask and wakes up in a strange warehouse.  After waking up, he and eight other individuals participate in “The Nonary Game, Ambidex Edition.” They must achieve a score of 9 on their wristbands and then escape through the Number 9 Door, but since everybody has their own wristband, there’s a chance not everyone will make it.  To gain points, they can either ally with one another or betray each other to escape faster.  If you played 999, you will notice this premise sounds remarkably similar.  While they are both based around the Nonary Game, rest assured VLW is its own entity.  Established early on, the story’s principle drama comes from the prisoner’s dilemma (a popular psychological/sociological concept).  Who will betray who, and why?  Will everyone play nice together, or should you not trust anyone?

VLW demands a little more thinking than the average video game if you want to solve mysteries ahead of time, but if any of this confuses you, the game explains it in very digestible terms, so don’t worry about it.  The meat of the plot is introduced to the player with the device of Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment used here to explore the nature of causality.  Not too far in to the game, you will inevitably get a Game Over or be unable to progress.  After that, the game takes you to a flow chart, and this is where the brilliance ofVLW comes in.  Jumping around and trying different choices during the game is actually canon.  The main character will realize that he is witnessing alternate realities, and needless to say your head will probably explode piecing together all the clues the game throws at you.  Saying much else about this would ruin the game, but I will say this: you must traverse the entire flow chart to finish the game for various reasons.  This allows you to learn all about the characters and see all different sides about them until the narrative finally comes together in the end.  999 did some similar things, but VLW feels much more streamlined.

The game’s puzzles will also destroy your brain.  I was stuck on this one about putting together a parallelogram for about an hour, and it wasn’t even the toughest puzzle.  In fact, I would almost complain that the game is too challenging and could scare casual gamers off.  Then again, we live in an age when anyone could just look up the answers, so perhaps the higher difficulty is for the best.  Aside from that, my only real structural problem with the game was this awful slow animation that takes place every time you travel from one room in the facility to another.  Apparently the game designer intends to improve this in Zero Escape 3, so that’s a relief at least.

Overall, I highly recommend Virtue’s Last Reward to anybody on the fence after playing999.  The game has pleasing visuals and an appropriate soundtrack that sets the mood quite well.  Likewise, the English voice acting is of very good quality (and only in the Vita version!  I lucked out), and I have few complaints about the story other than it maybe getting too complicated toward the end.  I felt that 999 was the more focused game and had a more entertaining cast, but in all honesty the two are both strong and I can accept someone thinking VLW has the better story.  The Flow Chart feature does speed up the required replaying, so for some that could be the deciding factor between the two.  Good luck, and watch out for strangers wearing gas masks.

8

Dragon Quest III

At last, I have played (or watched in the case of II) all of the main Dragon Quest games. Overall, Dragon Quest has grown on me tons over the years, and it’s definitely one of my favorite game series.  These games are RPGs at their most intuitive and engaging level. There are flaws along the way, but obviously that applies to everything.  While I’d still rank IV, V, VII and VIII above it, I think Dragon Quest III is a wonderful game, and the most successful at being a great NES-style RPG.  After this game, the series took a more story-oriented approach, which I also loved, but I think one reason Yuji Hori went down that path was because he couldn't top III by repeating its concept anymore.

Dragon Quest III is a game with player interaction at its core.  The challenge, enjoyment and satisfaction that the player gets depends entirely on his own actions and choices.   This is most clearly evidenced by III’s initial team recruitment.  You are given a choice of six classes (Soldier, Mage, Cleric, Jester, Fighter and Merchant; Thief in the remakes) and told one can change to a Sage later on.  That’s all the tutorial you get, but it’s enough to make logical decisions.  Players who take the game lightly and pick the joke classes will endure many hardships; players who plan well are rewarded.

Exploration is the second critical factor of the game, and it is again tied to the player’s choices and motivations.  Only rudimentary instructions guide you; filling in the map and learning how to take down enemies is your responsibility.  The game sets traps for players who don’t prepare themselves as well.  One memorable trap is the pyramid, which I explored instead of visiting the nearby town first despite an NPC’s advice.  In the pyramid, I fell to the bottom floor through a hole and landed in a room where, to my surprise, magic was unusable and the enemies were stronger than what I had faced so far.  Needless to say, I barely escaped alive.  DQIII pulls few punches: it trusts you to overcome challenges and think ahead.

There are some challenging bosses to deal with, particularly the final bosses of the game’s two halves.  In both cases, leveling up was not the solution I used.  I was able to defeat these enemies by switching strategies, focusing on different status magic and shifting my characters’ inventories and equipment setups.  People who say these games are all grinding have no idea what they’re talking about.  A player who takes a few minutes and thinks has no need to waste time walking in circles and farming metal slimes.  Other strong enemies in the game simply required further exploration of the map.  One, a snake beast named Orochi, was easily dealt with on a second attempt after I held off on fighting it for another dungeon. I think what the game throws at you is entirely fair: you just have to do a little work to get past things sometimes.  That’s the genius of Dragon Quest III’s design in a nutshell, and this aspect of challenge was something  sorely lacking in RPGs during the SNES and Playstation eras.

Of course, the game is not without problems.  Many of these are fixed in the remakes, but some aren’t.  The walking and ship speeds are unbearably slow, which was common in these games until the DS remakes.  I don’t know why nobody complained about how slow vehicles were during testing, but when exploring the globe takes a lot of sailing, you’ll curse that speed.  Encounter rates are much too high in some places (like sailing) , as is common in NES RPGs.  It’s hard to complain about an older game’s story, but I do think a few of the tips could have been clearer, especially in the final sections of the game; even in the Japanese version you’re sometimes at a loss about what to do without a guide.  The game gives you a memo pad type feature to help remember things with, but I could not get this to work on dialogue that I really needed.  I’ll just assume that was my own error and give the game the benefit of a doubt.

Dragon Quest III is in many ways the ultimate RPG of its time.  It blows the first two games out of the water both in scope and overall design.  It’s the standard by which future games in the series should be judged, and it makes Dragon Quest IX look completely pathetic.  No amount of tinkering with the job system is going to help if your core quest isn’t exciting, and it’s sad that a game from 1988 has cooler maps and better pacing than a game from 2009.  I highly recommend this title to anyone who loves RPGs and wants to play a pivotal game in their development as a genre.

7.5