Note: I am judging this game almost entirely on the single player mode. I dabble in competitive/post-E4 Pokemon, but it's not that important to me when looking at the game as a singular experience. If we're judging by that, then obviously this is the best Pokemon game to date.
This is the sixth generation of Pokemon games, and the series has matured with each entry while staying familiar, becoming more complicated on the gameplay end while maintaining its simple, Dragon Quest-inspired core. The games are still targeted at children, which is a bit surprising considering that the fanbase of the old games might be out for a little more; I know that at several points playing this game I wished the NPCs inhabiting the world spoke in a way that didn't make them seem like tutorials or that they were insulting my intelligence. Well, that's Nintendo for you. And really, it's a point that illustrates many of the problems I had with this game. Pokemon can't decide if it wants to be mind-numbingly easy and pandering to the youngest players or incredibly complicated. Up to this point, the games have done a decent job catering to fans of the RPG and fans of the monster collection and battling, but all of that is basically thrown out the window in X/Y.
Pokemon X/Y is mostly a big improvement on the visual end, but the audio leaves much to be desired. The 3D models for all monsters look great, with only a few showing some laziness. I have to commend Game Freak for going the extra mile on this front: all of the Pokemon have unique animations and react when attacked and attacking. The attacks themselves also look great, as does the world of the game, the characters, and basically everything but Lumiose City, which uses a 3D camera inferior to those seen in N64 games. I have always been a big fan of Pokemon's music, but this game left me cold much of the time. The battle music is the least memorable it's been since the beginning, and I hate how the gym leader battle music is just a techno track with no sense of tune now. On that note, I also miss how the music would change in Black/White when you reached the last Pokemon on a gym leader's team or your party was low on HP. The removal of this feature is baffling to me since it worked so well previously; they could have just reused the songs, even. Most of the field music is good and gives the player a great sense of adventure just like in past games. Sadly, these songs are the only ones that stand out as strong. Overall, I think the game works well on the aesthetic side of things, and this is probably the biggest improvement of the generation.
X/Y starts out pretty well on the gameplay end. This time around, Game Freak capitalized on the huge variety of Pokemon that have become available over the years. At least in the first half of the game, trainers use a satisfying mix of monsters and the player has tons of options to choose from even before the first gym. While I preferred how Black/White focused only on the new creatures, I enjoyed this approach too. It helped to make battles less monotonous and showed what a big series this has become in a fun way. Sadly, midway through the game I noticed trainers using a lot of the same Pokemon over and over, which seemed very odd. Sawk and Throh, for instance, are very common later on. Why use those guys so much when there is a wide pool of Fighting types available and they're among the more boring designs? It seems disjointed. One thing that truly bothered me was the number of Pokemon trainers used throughout the game. Only one battle, the final, had a trainer with a team of six, and all of the gym leaders only had three monsters. This was disappointing to me as a player who enjoys a good adversary. Perhaps the designers intended to improve the pace of the game, but I don't think this particular idea worked out well for them.
One of the more controversial additions to the game is the new Experience Share tool. If this device is left on, the entire team of Pokemon gain experience from every battle (and it's 50% of participators' too). While I loved that this helps get weaker Pokemon up to speed and encourages some experimentation, it also makes the game insanely easy. I finished this game with my levels being 10 higher than the final encounter's and I never once stopped to gain levels on purpose. I'm divided on the Experience Share; I think that the increase of pace it provides is mostly beneficial, but perhaps the developers could have made the game more challenging to combat the boon of bonus experience. As it is, X/Y is the easiest Pokemon game by a huge margin, and the games weren't that challenging to begin with.
My favorite new gameplay feature is the more streamlined online interface. If you play the game while online (friend who didn't: why didn't you? We could have had a great time giving each other powers and stuff. Oh well) No longer do you have to travel back to Pokemon Centers to play with your friends. Trading on the go, having a quick battle that doesn't interrupt the game flow, sending your buddy a boost to his money gain... it's all fun stuff that I highly appreciated. In ten years, none of this will matter since nobody's playing the game anymore, but I feel these changes were a good addition to help implement online play better.
The new super training feature is another notable addition. While it involves playing dumb mini-games, I am all for Game Freak cutting the crap and actually showing what is going on behind the scenes with stat growth. For those not in the know, all of the Pokemon games feature a hidden system in which you gain stats by battling certain types of Pokemon. Since generation 3, you've actually had to do this strategically to make a powerful team member for competitive play. In X/Y, the game shows you your stat growth in a chart format, which isn't perfect, but might help some players understand how the system works without resorting to guides, and I appreciate this big time. That said, playing mini-games to increase stats is just stupid and takes forever. To me, a much better solution would be for the player to gain universal stat points through battling and be able to assign those points at will. I could say the same thing about almost every tedious aspect of raising Pokemon, but I realize in the end these things are unlikely to be modified significantly. The post-game will always cater to people who only play Pokemon and leave everyone else in the dust.
Ultimately, the most problematic element of the game to me is its story. Obviously, I'm not looking for a deep plot or hugely dynamic characters here, but I would appreciate something that gets to the point, doesn't aspire to be what it isn't, and doesn't make me feel stupid for getting invested in it. More specifically, the characters in this game are garbage. The player begins by meeting a group of four other kids who kinda-sorta travel throughout the game alongside him or her. All of the kids have a single character trait that is displayed in the most bland manner possible: a fat guy that loves dancing, a little girl who wants to play nice, a boring rival whose only purpose is to be a rival, and a pointless girl who just wants to fill up the Pokedex and never says anything important. I appreciate Game Freak attempting to show that kids can travel on the Pokemon journey together, which makes a lot of sense, but if characters like these are going to be present, I'd prefer for them to develop or show some sign that the journey was meaningful. As they are now, they're just wasting time. For instance, in once scene you watched a fireworks show with the annoying little girl. It's meant to be an emotional moment that shows how the two are friends and will always be there for each other, but it's completely meaningless because nothing about the little girl or the hero makes us care about them. Some might argue that there's no point in complaining about these things, but since the game goes out of the way to show us these scenes while the older entries zipped along and went fine, I think it's worth bringing up. Pokemon Black/White didn't have a great story, but it attempted to make the rival (N) an interesting character with an arc and that worked out well for the most part. You can't just increase the amount of scenes side characters are present in to make them more effective--those scenes have to be meaningful, and this is where X/Y drops the ball.
The worst and most blatantly bad element of the story is Team Flare's involvement. Team Flare's goal is to create a world of only beautiful people, which is a great sinister plan, but runs in to the same problem as the rivals'. That's all there is to them, and they never show any sort of justification for their actions. Now, it's not like the teams in previous games were a lot better, but in a game that takes more breaks to show you story scenes, some extra development would have been appreciated. For all their faults, Team Plasma in B/W were somewhat sympathetic and made you think about the nature of the Pokemon universe. Team Rocket were out for money and power. Team Flare say they want to change the world because it's a bad place with all these filthy commoners strolling about, but here's the thing: there's no evidence that they may have some justification for their actions. For instance, one way the developers could have made Flare's motives understandable would be to have the Kalos region riddled by crime, pollution, or some other widespread issue. Instead, it seems like the team wants to destroy a world that is practically a utopia with no need for a real economy. It's madness and truly sours the experience; certainly, making a team that is blatantly evil ensures that the player will want to stop them, but it also prevents their actions from making any sense under scrutiny.
Pokemon X/Y is another Pokemon game. If you liked the last ones, you'll enjoy it too, and you may entirely disagree with the points I brought up here. I think this is a significant step back for the series in many ways, but the continued improvements on the mechanical end are noted and appreciated. It's hard to say where the series will go next (I didn't even touch on Mega Evolutions or the Fairy type. They're there) but hopefully Game Freak will try and make a game that is more focused next time.
7
Friday, October 25, 2013
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Suikoden
I'm nearly 20 years late to the party on this game, but I'm glad I finally gave it a shot. Suikoden is a traditional turn-based RPG that possesses the infamous gimmick of containing 108 party members (not all of them are used in the party, but they all become part of your forces). When I've thought about this series in the past, I figured there was no way this could be done adequately. I like media with ensemble casts, but the idea of 108 characters seemed ridiculous. Fortunately, I was very pleased with how the developers handled it in this game. By the end, I didn't feel like too many characters got the short end of the stick. It's true that a lot of them weren't as important as the principle cast, but what's great about Suikoden is everyone has something to contribute. The main characters all fight, the innkeeper heals you, the thieves and ninjas are critical to getting information in castle battles, and so on and so on. Having 108 characters also makes the game great for completionists--there are a lot to people to find, but it's not such a high number that doing so gets tedious, or worse, impossible like in some of the Pokémon games. Although the game is obviously primitive and some ideas are sure to be improved in sequels, I love what it was going for and think the army aspect of the game is pulled off beautifully.
Some of the game's worst problems come down to poor design decisions. Obviously, it's hard to conceive of a system with so many options that feels properly tweaked and fine-tuned, and while Suikoden tries its best, it comes short here. The game is laughably easy; no battle took any kind of planning ahead or tactical know-how to complete. Status magic is unimportant, and most characters are strong enough to hold their own with the materia-like runes the game gives you. The duels and castle battles are also not very engaging: the former requires a guide to play without screwing up and the latter just feel like scripted events after a point. It's great to have the whole army involved in a battle, though, so I can easily look the other way and hope these are improved in the sequels. In truth, the biggest problem with the game is how clunky the interfaces are for assigning runes and passing equipment around. In many ways Suikoden was treading new ground for these systems, but that doesn't make it more fun to deal with a primitive menu nowadays.
Suikoden's story is a little on the generic side, but it kept me engaged. It wisely opens with the introduction of a character (Ted) who is more than he seems and leaves the player wondering about his origins for quite some time. That, combined with how his special rune is so important to the villains, left me curious to know more as I played. On a more negative note, the game relies a bit too much on mind control as a plot device to avoid killing too many of the bad guys. It's nice to add the generals to your entourage after facing them, but it felt pretty cheap from a reader's perspective for them to be forgiven immediately because of magic. The use of this device is a big problem with Final Fantasy IV's story, and it's just as bad here. Late in the game, the story starts taking a darker turn and poses the question of whether Tir (the main character) is doing the right thing by attacking the empire. I enjoy developments like this, but the game doesn't go anywhere with it and ends after defeating the emperor anyway. While that may be addressed in the sequel, I still felt peeved that the plot would bring up an interesting concept and not follow through on it. I should also note that I greatly enjoyed the game's sense of humor. I expected the dialogue to be very serious and not have many light moments, but many of the characters' antics really put a smile on my face. None of the humor felt overdone, just like the kinds of things kids caught up in a war would say.
All in all, I can see why so many think this game is a classic, and it left me wanting to play the rest. Collecting the characters was fun (though some were near impossible to find without a guide) and the game had enough variety in tone and gameplay to keep me engaged the whole way through. If you never played Suikoden, I suggest giving it a try.
7.5
Some of the game's worst problems come down to poor design decisions. Obviously, it's hard to conceive of a system with so many options that feels properly tweaked and fine-tuned, and while Suikoden tries its best, it comes short here. The game is laughably easy; no battle took any kind of planning ahead or tactical know-how to complete. Status magic is unimportant, and most characters are strong enough to hold their own with the materia-like runes the game gives you. The duels and castle battles are also not very engaging: the former requires a guide to play without screwing up and the latter just feel like scripted events after a point. It's great to have the whole army involved in a battle, though, so I can easily look the other way and hope these are improved in the sequels. In truth, the biggest problem with the game is how clunky the interfaces are for assigning runes and passing equipment around. In many ways Suikoden was treading new ground for these systems, but that doesn't make it more fun to deal with a primitive menu nowadays.
Suikoden's story is a little on the generic side, but it kept me engaged. It wisely opens with the introduction of a character (Ted) who is more than he seems and leaves the player wondering about his origins for quite some time. That, combined with how his special rune is so important to the villains, left me curious to know more as I played. On a more negative note, the game relies a bit too much on mind control as a plot device to avoid killing too many of the bad guys. It's nice to add the generals to your entourage after facing them, but it felt pretty cheap from a reader's perspective for them to be forgiven immediately because of magic. The use of this device is a big problem with Final Fantasy IV's story, and it's just as bad here. Late in the game, the story starts taking a darker turn and poses the question of whether Tir (the main character) is doing the right thing by attacking the empire. I enjoy developments like this, but the game doesn't go anywhere with it and ends after defeating the emperor anyway. While that may be addressed in the sequel, I still felt peeved that the plot would bring up an interesting concept and not follow through on it. I should also note that I greatly enjoyed the game's sense of humor. I expected the dialogue to be very serious and not have many light moments, but many of the characters' antics really put a smile on my face. None of the humor felt overdone, just like the kinds of things kids caught up in a war would say.
All in all, I can see why so many think this game is a classic, and it left me wanting to play the rest. Collecting the characters was fun (though some were near impossible to find without a guide) and the game had enough variety in tone and gameplay to keep me engaged the whole way through. If you never played Suikoden, I suggest giving it a try.
7.5
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Random Game Thoughts Round-up
Man, I have been slacking on blogging since I've been busy working on Motrya. (Download it and play today!) I figured today would be as good as any to write a bit about some recent games I've played but not had enough to say about. I do this a lot lately, giving up on things because they're just getting dull to me. When I finish the game I'm playing now I'm sure I'll be able to write on it, but for now, here's what I missed:
WARNING: potential snap judgments ahead!
Knights in the Nightmare: This is a terrible, weird RTS / RPG hybrid that I loathed as soon as I left the tutorial. The gameplay is incredibly hard to describe and do justice: you just kind of stick a unit on the field and wait for enemies to walk in to range then use spells, hoping they work. It's painfully dull and nothing about it grabbed me at all.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: I played this for about seven hours before calling it quits. It's about on the same level as Partners in Time, so if that actually entertained you, by all means give this one a shot. It's a little better. This time, Mario travels in to Luigi's dreams! At first, it seems like the developers are going to use this in a novel way by having several series of interesting one-off puzzles and stages. However, it's the same tired gameplay as ever and without Bowser's snappy dialogue to compensate like in Bowser's Inside Story. The helper/guide characters are grating and never stop giving tutorials to the point where it's as surreal as an actual nightmare. I think I am actually done with Mario games after playing this, and I may actually be serious here. I don't know how you can take a concept as great as traveling through dreams and make it so dull.
Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland - The main draw of these games is supposedly the alchemy system, which you're supposed to master to get better at the game. I found collecting the items pretty tedious and didn't get far enough to say if it works well. I'm not a big fan of how time management is such a huge factor in this game, constantly being in fear I won't actually see the end of the story. Of course, I'm even less of a fan of the story itself--it seems like a steaming pile of fan service without much direction, lending credence to the misinformed idea that all JRPGs are terrible anime garbage (they aren't, but this is). I understand this series has sort of a cult following, but I think it's going to be contained to that cult as it's just blatantly unapproachable.
Shantae: Sorry, but this isn't a lost classic. While it looks very impressive for a Game Boy Color game, it has a lot of the same problems platformers of its ilk do. Bad enemy placement, sprites so big you can barely see anything coming ahead, and hitboxes that are nonsensical and distract from a smooth gameplay experience. The game looks and sounds great; I'll give it that. Maybe the sequel is better given it's on a better platform.
Great Greed: I was recommended this game a while back, and I can't understand why. It might have the strangest battle system I've encountered in an RPG in quite a while--there's almost no interactivity to it. The story is hilarious levels of stupid, so it might be worth taking a look at to get a chuckle.
Etrian Odyssey IV: While I like the core gameplay here and am a fan of the big dungeons, EO ultimately falls in to the "too tedious" category for me. You're never sure how your builds will pay off, and starting up a new character is frustrating. Almost every boss is trial and error, but without a quick way of taking another shot. Since the game is so lacking in every department other than combat and exploration, there's nothing keeping you going either. I did make it to the fourth stage of the game, so I got pretty far before quitting, but I can't recommend this game unless you're a lot more patient than me.
WARNING: potential snap judgments ahead!
Knights in the Nightmare: This is a terrible, weird RTS / RPG hybrid that I loathed as soon as I left the tutorial. The gameplay is incredibly hard to describe and do justice: you just kind of stick a unit on the field and wait for enemies to walk in to range then use spells, hoping they work. It's painfully dull and nothing about it grabbed me at all.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: I played this for about seven hours before calling it quits. It's about on the same level as Partners in Time, so if that actually entertained you, by all means give this one a shot. It's a little better. This time, Mario travels in to Luigi's dreams! At first, it seems like the developers are going to use this in a novel way by having several series of interesting one-off puzzles and stages. However, it's the same tired gameplay as ever and without Bowser's snappy dialogue to compensate like in Bowser's Inside Story. The helper/guide characters are grating and never stop giving tutorials to the point where it's as surreal as an actual nightmare. I think I am actually done with Mario games after playing this, and I may actually be serious here. I don't know how you can take a concept as great as traveling through dreams and make it so dull.
Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland - The main draw of these games is supposedly the alchemy system, which you're supposed to master to get better at the game. I found collecting the items pretty tedious and didn't get far enough to say if it works well. I'm not a big fan of how time management is such a huge factor in this game, constantly being in fear I won't actually see the end of the story. Of course, I'm even less of a fan of the story itself--it seems like a steaming pile of fan service without much direction, lending credence to the misinformed idea that all JRPGs are terrible anime garbage (they aren't, but this is). I understand this series has sort of a cult following, but I think it's going to be contained to that cult as it's just blatantly unapproachable.
Shantae: Sorry, but this isn't a lost classic. While it looks very impressive for a Game Boy Color game, it has a lot of the same problems platformers of its ilk do. Bad enemy placement, sprites so big you can barely see anything coming ahead, and hitboxes that are nonsensical and distract from a smooth gameplay experience. The game looks and sounds great; I'll give it that. Maybe the sequel is better given it's on a better platform.
Great Greed: I was recommended this game a while back, and I can't understand why. It might have the strangest battle system I've encountered in an RPG in quite a while--there's almost no interactivity to it. The story is hilarious levels of stupid, so it might be worth taking a look at to get a chuckle.
Etrian Odyssey IV: While I like the core gameplay here and am a fan of the big dungeons, EO ultimately falls in to the "too tedious" category for me. You're never sure how your builds will pay off, and starting up a new character is frustrating. Almost every boss is trial and error, but without a quick way of taking another shot. Since the game is so lacking in every department other than combat and exploration, there's nothing keeping you going either. I did make it to the fourth stage of the game, so I got pretty far before quitting, but I can't recommend this game unless you're a lot more patient than me.
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