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.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Kirby's Dream Land 2
This is a bad game. I used to like it when I was a kid; I remember begging my grandmother to buy it for me. I remember thinking the new animal buddies were cool, and it was the first Kirby game I played that had the copy ability so that was neat at the time. Ultimately, I wish I had not revisited this game, as it doesn't hold up at all. Out of curiosity, I looked it up and found out Masahiro Sakurai, the man behind Kirby and Super Smash Bros, had no involvement with this game or Dream Land 3. That doesn't surprise me. I always suspected the Kirby games involving Dark Matter and animal buddies were designed by a different team than the rest, and it's true after all.
Dream Land 2 has a few major problems that really stick out to an aged gamer. The first is enemy spawning: scroll an enemy off the screen, and it respawns immediately after that part of the screen becomes visible again. This is unbelievably frustrating in the various water maze puzzles in this game, and punishes you for backtracking to get things you missed. Another issue I have with the game is that the buddies and copy abilities Kirby uses are so much worse than his generic swallow and spit attacks. The attacks barely do any damage to bosses, making them take forever to beat. Even worse, a lot of the abilities will put you in precarious positions when used on bosses anyway. For instance, if you want to whack one with the parasol, it will take no hit-stun and just walk right in to you, rendering whatever advantage having the skill would give moot.
The animal buddies are a bigger problem. First, there's Rick the hamster. Using him is inferior to just using Kirby, as you lose the ability to fly and have a bigger hitbox. None of the attacks he can use make up for this. Coo the owl is actually pretty awesome (and has an amazing theme song; actually, all the music in this game is great) but the game doesn't want you to use him! No! In almost every stage, you'll be forced to use Kine the fish, who is absolutely terrible out of water but is required in order to collect the rainbow drops you need to finish the game in about half of the game's levels. It's almost like a cruel joke by the developers. They give you all these potentially neat abilities, then make you use only the worst ones to get anywhere.
The final boss is terrible too, and he's the icing on the crap cake. To fight Dark Matter, you have to use the new Rainbow sword ability. Kirby also gets to move freely in all directions... very slowly. This makes it nearly impossible to avoid Dark Matter's screen-splitting attacks, and since the sword doesn't actually hurt the boss, you have to reflect his attacks with it. The physics of this are poorly conceived to say the least, so I would not be surprised if many players didn't bother to beat the boss. I know I save-scummed through it on this playthrough.
I wanted to say some nice things about this game, but apart from the soundtrack (Ando is a genius composer, seriously) there's not much to recommend. This game is worse than Kirby Super Star in every way, and there's nothing that would encourage a replay. The level design is poor, the bosses are done better in other Kirby games, and the physics feel stiff and antiquated. Look elsewhere for your Kirby fix.
4
Dream Land 2 has a few major problems that really stick out to an aged gamer. The first is enemy spawning: scroll an enemy off the screen, and it respawns immediately after that part of the screen becomes visible again. This is unbelievably frustrating in the various water maze puzzles in this game, and punishes you for backtracking to get things you missed. Another issue I have with the game is that the buddies and copy abilities Kirby uses are so much worse than his generic swallow and spit attacks. The attacks barely do any damage to bosses, making them take forever to beat. Even worse, a lot of the abilities will put you in precarious positions when used on bosses anyway. For instance, if you want to whack one with the parasol, it will take no hit-stun and just walk right in to you, rendering whatever advantage having the skill would give moot.
The animal buddies are a bigger problem. First, there's Rick the hamster. Using him is inferior to just using Kirby, as you lose the ability to fly and have a bigger hitbox. None of the attacks he can use make up for this. Coo the owl is actually pretty awesome (and has an amazing theme song; actually, all the music in this game is great) but the game doesn't want you to use him! No! In almost every stage, you'll be forced to use Kine the fish, who is absolutely terrible out of water but is required in order to collect the rainbow drops you need to finish the game in about half of the game's levels. It's almost like a cruel joke by the developers. They give you all these potentially neat abilities, then make you use only the worst ones to get anywhere.
The final boss is terrible too, and he's the icing on the crap cake. To fight Dark Matter, you have to use the new Rainbow sword ability. Kirby also gets to move freely in all directions... very slowly. This makes it nearly impossible to avoid Dark Matter's screen-splitting attacks, and since the sword doesn't actually hurt the boss, you have to reflect his attacks with it. The physics of this are poorly conceived to say the least, so I would not be surprised if many players didn't bother to beat the boss. I know I save-scummed through it on this playthrough.
I wanted to say some nice things about this game, but apart from the soundtrack (Ando is a genius composer, seriously) there's not much to recommend. This game is worse than Kirby Super Star in every way, and there's nothing that would encourage a replay. The level design is poor, the bosses are done better in other Kirby games, and the physics feel stiff and antiquated. Look elsewhere for your Kirby fix.
4
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
SpaceChem
SpaceChem is a chemistry-based puzzle game released by Zachtronics Industries in 2011. In the game, you essentially guide two input circles called "Waldos" along conveyor belt-like lines, grabbing atoms and fusing them, then outputting the needed compounds on the other side of the screen. It's the most boring-sounding premise ever, but I quickly found myself engaged. At its core, SpaceChem is more like a set of programming puzzles than anything resembling chemistry. It's all about figuring out the most efficient way of making sets of data do exactly what you want them to do. It's fun to look at the leaderboards after every stage and see how well other players did, if they found solutions that took far fewer cycles or used minimal instructions.
What really sets this game apart from other puzzle titles I've played is its difficulty: it's totally brutal, but somehow I didn't mind. I would spend hours, sometimes entire work days (on and off) on a single puzzle, trying to piece together a feasible path through various stages.
Pictured is the level I essentially have stopped playing the game on, though I plan to dabble with it on and off. Here, I am trying to make the blue path alternate given its input, then travel to the proper side of the screen and give the correct compound. (I'm only half-finished here) One of the things that makes SpaceChem so difficult is the size of the grid. Often, you will need to make complex paths in only a small 4x4 grid, then you'll test and find out modifications need to be made that destroy your entire framework. Then, you have to make your path recursive so that it will complete the necessary number of cycles, which is sometimes as hard as making the path in the first place. And THEN some stages require you to make multiple paths work and then connect to one another. I have restarted many missions without making any progress, but somehow never actually got frustrated. See, for all the tedium involved in solving the game's puzzles, I feel so satisfied when a complete circuit works that it makes up for all the agony getting there. You could say SpaceChem is the Demon's Souls of puzzle games.
This game isn't for everyone. If you don't have any knowledge of programming or computer science, I would stay very far away. If you do, try this game out, going in as blindly as possible. The concept is ingenious; simple on the surface but with unfathomable flexibility and surprising replay value for efficiency nuts. There is some nice music too, for what it's worth, though I stopped playing that early on because of the length of time I'd spend on each level. I doubt I will ever finish SpaceChem, but I feel totally satisfied with it after only the taste I've had.
8
What really sets this game apart from other puzzle titles I've played is its difficulty: it's totally brutal, but somehow I didn't mind. I would spend hours, sometimes entire work days (on and off) on a single puzzle, trying to piece together a feasible path through various stages.
Pictured is the level I essentially have stopped playing the game on, though I plan to dabble with it on and off. Here, I am trying to make the blue path alternate given its input, then travel to the proper side of the screen and give the correct compound. (I'm only half-finished here) One of the things that makes SpaceChem so difficult is the size of the grid. Often, you will need to make complex paths in only a small 4x4 grid, then you'll test and find out modifications need to be made that destroy your entire framework. Then, you have to make your path recursive so that it will complete the necessary number of cycles, which is sometimes as hard as making the path in the first place. And THEN some stages require you to make multiple paths work and then connect to one another. I have restarted many missions without making any progress, but somehow never actually got frustrated. See, for all the tedium involved in solving the game's puzzles, I feel so satisfied when a complete circuit works that it makes up for all the agony getting there. You could say SpaceChem is the Demon's Souls of puzzle games.
This game isn't for everyone. If you don't have any knowledge of programming or computer science, I would stay very far away. If you do, try this game out, going in as blindly as possible. The concept is ingenious; simple on the surface but with unfathomable flexibility and surprising replay value for efficiency nuts. There is some nice music too, for what it's worth, though I stopped playing that early on because of the length of time I'd spend on each level. I doubt I will ever finish SpaceChem, but I feel totally satisfied with it after only the taste I've had.
8
Monday, August 19, 2013
Shin Megami Tensei IV
As the fifth Shin Megami Tensei title I've finished, the series is starting to feel very familiar to me. Shin Megami Tensei is one of the bigger RPG series in Japan, and it's pretty easy to see why once you get in to the games. They are designed like classic RPGs, emphasizing challenge and sometimes frustrating random chance. They do monster collection effectively, making the player adapt to the changing difficulty curve instead of getting too attached to his team. They offer the option of changing the game's outcome, even if the choices aren't so hot. Shin Megami Tensei IV ranks somewhere in the middle of the series to me, but it is a good introduction to mainline SMT for newcomers and probably the best RPG on the 3DS so far.
SMT IV starts out differently than its predecessor, Nocturne. Instead of a kid in the big city, you're a hopeful samurai candidate in what appears to be a feudal Japanese kingdom called Mikado. Things seem fishy to the player because the samurai have electronic technology that they regard as mystic relics. After a quick trial, you explore a strange cave called Naraku that lies beneath your kingdom and is filled with demons. The game's story doesn't really unfold until you reach the bottom of Naraku, and I don't want to spoil what happens, but needless to say it evolves in to the usual Law vs Chaos story so prevalent in the series. While I enjoyed the setup of this game, I think the characters don't always show the best motivations or justification for their actions. Like in other SMT titles, only the extremes of each personality type accomplish anything by end-game, and you never feel right about supporting them. The Neutral path makes a decent compromise, but still has a questionable result. I'm not opposed to a game having nothing but bad endings, but I do feel like SMT games often end on an unnecessarily bleak note, only accentuating the negative. Fortunately, the story is secondary to gameplay in SMT, so nitpicking it too much doesn't accomplish a whole lot. One thing the game does really well is creating a sense of dramatic irony: the player is aware that something is wrong with Mikado and the game's world as a whole, but the characters have no clue. This makes the game's many twists and pokes of humor, especially involving your AI assistant, Burroughs, very effective.
SMT IV's visual style is weird. For the most part, it looks good. The demons are well-animated and the 3D environments look beautiful. It's clear that the game was on a limited budget, though. Most of its cutscenes are just characters standing and staring at things without moving, leaving one to wonder why the game wasn't just developed in visual novel style like Persona 3 Portable. Some of the new demons introduced in the game have very odd designs that I didn't think meshed well with the old ones. Often, they are caricatures of humans or grotesque things with anatomy that makes little sense. I feel the developers could have done a little better job of hiding the fact that some parts of the game didn't get as much attention as others. On the other hand, the music is great. It has a nice mix of electronica, hard rock and even bagpipe music. I thought I would miss Shoji Meguro, who really made Nocturne and Strange Journey work well on the sound front, but this game's composers are more than worthy to take his reins.
The gameplay is mostly what you'd expect from the main series: the press turn battle system is back. Hitting weaknesses and not missing is of vital importance, even if you have to burn MP to do it. I was not sure how I liked this system at first back in Nocturne, but I do like how it encourages using skills instead of conservation, which makes for slow and boring gameplay in many games. This time, your main character's build is almost completely up to you. Instead of learning skills from equipment, Flynn gets them from Demon Whispers. When your party members have learned all of their skills, they can "whisper" them to the hero, letting you basically pick whatever skills you want. I think this is great for many reasons, but the primary one is that it lets you experiment with skills before committing to them. Many RPGs force you to go down skill paths without prior knowledge of where you'll end up, but here there's no ambiguity. Overall, this makes the game engine feel improved from its predecessors, and the typical fast battle speed returns as well, so combat is very streamlined. As far as battles go, my one real complaint is about ambushes. If an enemy sneaks up on you, often you are just plain dead. Getting hit by a weakness, a critical, or status effects often spells the end for your entire party. Worse, ambushes can happen on reinforcements or even during boss battles. It just feels cruel and unusual.
On the flip side, the game has a lot of features that make it more newbie-friendly than other entries in the series. It's very forgiving about game overs, for one. For a fee of either money or 3DS Play Coins (which I thought was a nice touch as it got me to exercise a bit while playing this, believe it or not) you can get revived right before the battle you died in. I don't care how hardcore of a gamer you are; this is a good feature that every RPG should have. The game also does everything it can to make the monster fusion system easier to understand, even to the point of recommending fusions. These recommendations are usually good choices, so I think new players will be able to pick it up with little problem.
The game's biggest problem is really its overworld map. Once you reach this area, it's pretty obvious why. You can only travel on small, jagged paths that are maze-like in structure, and you have to do this just to get from town to town. While it's possible to avoid encounters in the dungeons, you cannot on the world map. You also cannot control whether or not you get ambushed. The game assumes you have some knowledge of Tokyo's layout, which would probably help in finding areas you need to travel to, but even then it can be hard to remember a certain road is blocked off or you have to take X tunnel to reach Y location. Add together the dead ends, frequent encounters, and backtracking the game requires and you end up with some ultra tedious exploration. This problem plagues the game from beginning to end, and even the air travel you eventually find only lets you land in useless spots. It's a gross stain on a game that easily could have been one of my favorites.
Shin Megami Tensei has gone on for a long time. Many good games have been released under the brand, and it's gradually becoming one of my favorites. That said, Atlus really needs to get a clue about certain things. It's just silly that Persona gets all of the innovation, character development, and fast travel while the mainline series gets the gameplay depth and build options. These things should not be mutually exclusive. While Shin Megami Tensei IV is a great game, with just a few of the lessons learned from other games in the series, it could really have felt more polished and appealed to more players. RPG enthusiasts should still enjoy the game if they can get past angels and demons being lumped together as the same thing, but even though it's more accessible, I'm not sure I can recommend this to a player unfamiliar with the genre.
8
SMT IV starts out differently than its predecessor, Nocturne. Instead of a kid in the big city, you're a hopeful samurai candidate in what appears to be a feudal Japanese kingdom called Mikado. Things seem fishy to the player because the samurai have electronic technology that they regard as mystic relics. After a quick trial, you explore a strange cave called Naraku that lies beneath your kingdom and is filled with demons. The game's story doesn't really unfold until you reach the bottom of Naraku, and I don't want to spoil what happens, but needless to say it evolves in to the usual Law vs Chaos story so prevalent in the series. While I enjoyed the setup of this game, I think the characters don't always show the best motivations or justification for their actions. Like in other SMT titles, only the extremes of each personality type accomplish anything by end-game, and you never feel right about supporting them. The Neutral path makes a decent compromise, but still has a questionable result. I'm not opposed to a game having nothing but bad endings, but I do feel like SMT games often end on an unnecessarily bleak note, only accentuating the negative. Fortunately, the story is secondary to gameplay in SMT, so nitpicking it too much doesn't accomplish a whole lot. One thing the game does really well is creating a sense of dramatic irony: the player is aware that something is wrong with Mikado and the game's world as a whole, but the characters have no clue. This makes the game's many twists and pokes of humor, especially involving your AI assistant, Burroughs, very effective.
SMT IV's visual style is weird. For the most part, it looks good. The demons are well-animated and the 3D environments look beautiful. It's clear that the game was on a limited budget, though. Most of its cutscenes are just characters standing and staring at things without moving, leaving one to wonder why the game wasn't just developed in visual novel style like Persona 3 Portable. Some of the new demons introduced in the game have very odd designs that I didn't think meshed well with the old ones. Often, they are caricatures of humans or grotesque things with anatomy that makes little sense. I feel the developers could have done a little better job of hiding the fact that some parts of the game didn't get as much attention as others. On the other hand, the music is great. It has a nice mix of electronica, hard rock and even bagpipe music. I thought I would miss Shoji Meguro, who really made Nocturne and Strange Journey work well on the sound front, but this game's composers are more than worthy to take his reins.
The gameplay is mostly what you'd expect from the main series: the press turn battle system is back. Hitting weaknesses and not missing is of vital importance, even if you have to burn MP to do it. I was not sure how I liked this system at first back in Nocturne, but I do like how it encourages using skills instead of conservation, which makes for slow and boring gameplay in many games. This time, your main character's build is almost completely up to you. Instead of learning skills from equipment, Flynn gets them from Demon Whispers. When your party members have learned all of their skills, they can "whisper" them to the hero, letting you basically pick whatever skills you want. I think this is great for many reasons, but the primary one is that it lets you experiment with skills before committing to them. Many RPGs force you to go down skill paths without prior knowledge of where you'll end up, but here there's no ambiguity. Overall, this makes the game engine feel improved from its predecessors, and the typical fast battle speed returns as well, so combat is very streamlined. As far as battles go, my one real complaint is about ambushes. If an enemy sneaks up on you, often you are just plain dead. Getting hit by a weakness, a critical, or status effects often spells the end for your entire party. Worse, ambushes can happen on reinforcements or even during boss battles. It just feels cruel and unusual.
On the flip side, the game has a lot of features that make it more newbie-friendly than other entries in the series. It's very forgiving about game overs, for one. For a fee of either money or 3DS Play Coins (which I thought was a nice touch as it got me to exercise a bit while playing this, believe it or not) you can get revived right before the battle you died in. I don't care how hardcore of a gamer you are; this is a good feature that every RPG should have. The game also does everything it can to make the monster fusion system easier to understand, even to the point of recommending fusions. These recommendations are usually good choices, so I think new players will be able to pick it up with little problem.
The game's biggest problem is really its overworld map. Once you reach this area, it's pretty obvious why. You can only travel on small, jagged paths that are maze-like in structure, and you have to do this just to get from town to town. While it's possible to avoid encounters in the dungeons, you cannot on the world map. You also cannot control whether or not you get ambushed. The game assumes you have some knowledge of Tokyo's layout, which would probably help in finding areas you need to travel to, but even then it can be hard to remember a certain road is blocked off or you have to take X tunnel to reach Y location. Add together the dead ends, frequent encounters, and backtracking the game requires and you end up with some ultra tedious exploration. This problem plagues the game from beginning to end, and even the air travel you eventually find only lets you land in useless spots. It's a gross stain on a game that easily could have been one of my favorites.
Shin Megami Tensei has gone on for a long time. Many good games have been released under the brand, and it's gradually becoming one of my favorites. That said, Atlus really needs to get a clue about certain things. It's just silly that Persona gets all of the innovation, character development, and fast travel while the mainline series gets the gameplay depth and build options. These things should not be mutually exclusive. While Shin Megami Tensei IV is a great game, with just a few of the lessons learned from other games in the series, it could really have felt more polished and appealed to more players. RPG enthusiasts should still enjoy the game if they can get past angels and demons being lumped together as the same thing, but even though it's more accessible, I'm not sure I can recommend this to a player unfamiliar with the genre.
8
Thursday, July 25, 2013
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
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