Kingdom Hearts 2

Decided to finish Kingdom Hearts 2, including getting Jiminy's Journal complete. Didn’t take long, but longer than I would’ve liked – I ran out of stupid Dark Crystals just as I’d almost got the synthesis list finished. The last boss was more fiddly and annoying than I would’ve expected, and I hated having to be Riku almost as much as I hated having to be Roxas, but I was satisfied with the game’s ending. Another bit of Japanese media that ends on the old ‘Tadaima/okaeri’ chestnut, which never translates well into English - we don’t place such importance on ‘Welcome home/I’m back’ – and wow, the kids really did look Japanese in that ending FMV. I also loved how they just dropped all but the thinnest pretence that the storyline isn’t totally homoerotic at the end, too. The secret ending was really lame, but I’d’ve felt bad, not seeing it.

To be honest, though, it definitely doesn’t match up to the first game, story-wise. The new worlds never fit into the mood well, and Organisation XIII just aren’t very interesting as antagonists. It relies so much on intrigue that when all is revealed, it’s just increasingly disappointing. Xemnas is off his rocker, a two-dimensional baddie and none of the others are sufficiently developed. All style, no substance. At least Sora is the kind of character who can really carry a story, even if he IS generic shounen character #1.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Eternal Sonata

Last night, I unexpectedly finished Eternal Sonata. I really didn’t think I was close to the end. I thought I was about halfway through, and that the rubbish final dungeon with the ridiculously easy bosses was some kind of transition. And then, abruptly, ‘Final Stage’. Another easy boss (though I have to admit it was a surprise who he was), and the ending. Which was very, very strange. 45 minutes of being directly lectured by pretty RPG characters, some incoherent story, and then after the credits, some weird allegorical tale about a snail and a caterpillar – that they had forgotten to subtitle!

I want to play it again with a guide (and in English), to see if there are any significant chunks I have missed, any hidden worlds, so I will reserve judgement until then, but I have to say, judging from my overall experience thus far, I’m very disappointed that such a beautiful game, with such potential to be epic and such great designs, was so lacking in substance. Everything about it was limited, except the visual feast – but in an RPG, that simply isn’t enough.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Crisis Core

Overall, it was a great game and I’m glad I played it, but it had some major flaws. I’ll play it through again with a guide this time, but probably not for a while yet. Definitely more enjoyable playing a game with no spoilers, but perhaps I’d’ve benefited from a guide when unwinnable battles came along and I spent way too long struggling to survive. There’s a lot I haven’t seen, but playing it again is the best way to level up, since you can start a new game with stats intact.

Crisis Core is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII, which made a deep impression on me. Of course, I won’t be putting in the same hours as I did as a bewitched 13-year-old awed by the power of Playstation, but the fan in me was very happy with the fanservice here. It’s bizarre to think just how many of the current generation of gamers simply won’t have played FFVII, and never will until there’s a remake that isn’t so dated, and just won’t see how much of the game is replicated here, from the intro to several memorable locales. It’s a familiar world to me, one I’m fond of, and little in-jokes like mentions of Don Kanonji and the missions with a very young Yuffie make me smile. We finally see Zack’s story, elevating him from the plot function of the main game to a fleshed-out character. He’s given a typical happy-go-lucky Shounen personality, which surprised me at first but which I soon grew to find quite agreeable. His development as he learns about his fellow SOLDIER members and the world he lives in is a pleasure, and though the inevitability of the ending seems almost tacked-on and bizarre, it still has a sting. Nice, also, to give Tseng a bigger role than the more appreciated Reno/Rude duo.

Other parts of the plot aren’t so great. Sure, Cloud and Tifa’s memories are a big plot point of the main game, so what happens here make sense (even if Cloud has to be unconscious for some half of his screentime), but why Aerith never mentions any of what happens here, or no-one from Shin-ra who knew Cloud and Zack seem to say anything, or why Hojo reacts to Cloud quite like he does in the main game doesn’t seem to hang well with events here. Oh well, there’ll always be a bit of retcon in a prequel like this, and by and large, those quibbles are minor. Angeal works, too, but the weird monster things that soon appear with his characteristics are mostly really goofy and attempts to make them sympathetic at the end don’t really work. Genesis, apparently a Dirge of Cerberus character (I should play that sometime, really), mostly doesn’t work very well as an antagonist, much like Sephiroth towards the very end of FFVII, being too loopy to really seem threatening or to be understood. I can kind of see how it worked in Japan, with someone with the stature of Gackt hamming up the pastiche poetry of ‘Loveless’, an in-game prophetic text, but I don’t like that something like that should be necessary, and I definitely don’t think that it works in the English version, let alone being pivotal to a character’s motives. This is largely why the final third of the game or so is so unsatisfying.

Gameplay is good, though, much more influenced by Kingdom Hearts than other FF games, albeit less frenetic and slicker. Sometimes the targeting system was very frustrating, and it was daft that so many enemies can be killed just by mashing X, but there was a good bit of strategy towards the end and I got very used to dodge-rolling. On the other hand, there were some real frustrations. I made the mistake of choosing ‘Hard’ at the beginning, remembering how Kingdom Hearts II was just way too easy on normal, and regretted it. Hard mode doesn’t seem to make a better challenge, or require more skill or adapt itself to a decent learning curve. It just cranks up damage, I think. So you get hugely frustrating scenarios where you can beat the ordinary grunts very easily and then a boss comes who on normal mode would be a slight jump up and a fun challenge, but in hard just wipes you out with one attack. It made things much more frustrating, not fun. Then there’s the badly-thought-out limit break/levelling system, based on chance and infuriating, sometimes totally overloading you with power, sometimes never registering its presence at all. And it may be hard mode, but I ended up just having to always equip items preventing stun, stop and death, because against any powerful enemies, getting any one of these usually meant game over. Death in particular was just stupid.

The missions idea isn’t bad per se, but there was just way, way too much of the same things, over and over. I feel like I did endless stupid missions, but have barely limped over half of the total…

I’ll say this, though – he may be a solid everyman in FFVII and quite badass in Advent Crisis, but in Crisis Core, wow, they make Cloud a cute, rather hapless uke. Somehow I like him a whole lot more…

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village

This afternoon, I decided that before doing anything more productive, I’d finish the first DS game I bought, the brilliantly charming Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village. It hasn’t been eating up the most recent part of my life (shame the same can’t be said of Patapon and its sequel) but I at least put enough hours into the fun little game to solve all its puzzles, including the bonus ones. And I’m proud to say that I didn’t need any help beyond the in-game hints to solve ’em, although some of the more annoying trick puzzles took me quite a while, and I did have to resort to a guide to help me find a couple of the hidden puzzles right at the end. Hidden in windows indeed!

As someone who grew up playing The 7th Guest, the puzzles here were comparatively very easy (could solve one of the hardest ‘99 Picarat’ puzzles here in seconds because it was in that game), but then the target audience is younger and back then, games generally were made more of a challenge.

But over and above the puzzles and gameplay, it’s the world and story created here that really charm. I have to say, I love it when Japanese writers take a stab at making a very quaint and twee British world. Few things can be more charming than the nostalgic, idealised and stereotypical portrayal of early 20th-century European life than the one here, where the Holmes-like Professor Layton and his little sidekick Luke (who I remain very pleased they redubbed with a cockney accent for the UK release, even if it was even more over-the-top, because…well, everything about the game is over-the-top and that suits the game well) can blithely go around a town where a murder investigation is underway and find puzzles everywhere, commenting on it all in their broad accents.

I also find myself rather amused that there is a thriving yaoi-based fandom for the games…tsk tsk tsk!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Kingdom Hearts: Re:CoM

Finally got around to finishing Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories. Honestly, Riku’s story was a drag, with too much trawling through worlds without any plot and far too little reward. It was too easy even on Proud Mode, too – I was very surprised when I beat the final boss, expecting it to be only the first part of a longer battle.

Very much worthwhile as a free extra, but certainly not something that ought to be sold as a standalone game.

The abiding impressions I’ve been left with by this game:

• Most of the organisation are totally pointless, useless and uninteresting.
• Naminé is more interesting than I remembered, and Riku more likeable.
• I still don’t quite see where his blindfold comes from.
• No matter the graphical engine used, the grid pattern on the back of Roxas’s head looks really, really silly.
• Riku is actually far more sympathetic than I gave him credit for, even if his part of the game is dull.

Well, that’s out of the way. Next, I ought to go back to Final Fantasy XII, if I’m gonna be cosplaying from it sometime soon. Then Persona 3 and the numerous other games I have lined up, including KH2: FM. Plus the handheld games that keep distracting me: I finished a chapter today, but far later than expected because I kept grabbing my new DS to play Professor Layton and the Curious Village or my PSP to play Patapon. But hey…games, particularly games with a good story and strong characters, never seem like time wasted.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Birth By Sleep first impressions

I’ve just started to play Birth By Sleep, the latest Kingdom Hearts game for the PSP. It’s extremely impressive, really, what Square can get out of a handheld console. The DS was pushed hard with 358/2 Days, but BBS really does look and play like a PS2 title. The graphics are beautifully-rendered, in a similar style to Crisis Core but if anything, suiting the more cartoony look of Kingdom Hearts more.

And while 358/2 really didn’t bring much to the story of Kingdom Hearts, I actually quite like the angle BBS is presenting. Honestly, I was fully prepared to hate it, thinking the pretentiousness would further ruin a neat concept, which after all has got progressively less coherent, more morally dubious and certainly less interesting as it has got more focused on Organization XIII. I always found them underdeveloped, clichéd and poorly-motivated, no matter where fandom has taken the characters. Going way back for a prequel in a more Final Fantasy-like setting with lots of mysteries and a new cast isn’t just recycling the formula, and there are some differences in paying style. I like the new gameplay elements like the focus bursts and going into speed rave mode is lots of fun.

For once, Proud Mode is also actually quite tricky, although almost entirely because the damage is up so high.

I think I like Ventus a lot more than Roxas, too. He’s sweet and a little bratty, his world isn’t as annoying as Twilight Town and his connection with Terra seems much more substantial than his doppelganger’s friendship based on…well, the guy who’s generally around when he wakes up and sometimes has ice cream with him.

That said…even though it’s not quite such a load of squares, the back of his head is still annoying to look at! Ooh, and I like the fact that Xenahort looks like the Harkonnen mentat from Dune 2, heheh. There’s a lot of plot to uncover yet, but so far it’s been packed with minigames and fun little stories. Nice, too, to see some Disney worlds that aren’t repeated from the first two games – although dear Shirayuki-hime was quite annoying, always needing saving.

At the very least, it’s the first game since #2 that’s actually made me want to go back to it quickly. That says a lot!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Monkey Island II: Special Edition

Anyway, I may have stayed up late last night playing through Monkey Island II: Special Edition. In a single sitting I got 65% of the way through the game, to the second map piece. Essentially, Lucasarts have taken the classic game, updated it with hi-res graphics, rerecorded the soundtrack and at certain points offered a creators’ commentary, which is quite a fun addition. I enjoyed playing through it, but strictly as something complimentary. I would actually be sad if someone played only the updated version and didn’t have the joy of getting absorbed in the original as I did.

Honestly, I don’t like the graphics very much. Granted, I’m happy that Guybrush no longer looks like he’s forty, but I don’t like that he looks and moves as if he’s made of plasticine. Some of the voices are brilliant, like Wally the Cartographer’s, but others just don’t seem to understand their lines and really muck up the deadpan humour. Worst of all, most of the characters just… didn’t end up looking like they did in the original, totally changing perceptions of their haughtiness or humility. Percy in particular just doesn’t look as sweet as he used to, and most of the fat and loveable characters now look fat and repulsive. The strangest thing about it is that the concept art for the update almost always gets it spot-on!

The humour isn’t quite as good as I remember, either, although it is excellent. There’s a lot more breaking the fourth wall than I remember, which never escapes being unfunny, and some of the puzzles are just ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to figure out how to turn off the waterfall pump, or what books are needed from the library? And I still leapt for a bit of paper when the skeleton dance came on, as I always did as a boy, never knowing that Guybrush writes the instructions on the spit-encrusted paper. I always thought if you missed writing it down, you were screwed!

Lastly, I simply cannot forgive one omission: how can they cut out the dancing monkeys from the intro? They were the thing I was looking forward to the most!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

FINAL FANTASY X

It was a game I took a long time to get around to playing, but thought that I would really love. It has a good reputation amongst enthusiasts and so much about it looked like a lot of fun. I do not, however, think that I had unreasonable expectations: just high hopes. Either way, I found myself disappointed – with the story, the gameplay, the graphics, the characters…even the music, because despite the very pleasant opening theme, that prayer theme is a motif I never, never want to hear again if I can help it.

I play most Final Fantasy titles to the ground. I put well over a hundred hours into FFVII when I was in my middle teens, finding every last hidden scene, materia and hidden boss. I put enough into FFXII to beat Yiazmat and Omega mk XIII. I found Ozma in Final Fantasy IX surprisingly easy and still want to revisit the game to try to make more sense out of that ending. But FFX ranks alongside Final Fantasy VIII as one I just didn’t care about and wanted to be over and done with as soon as possible. Granted, I didn’t dislike FFX as much as FFVIII, in which I didn’t even bother to get all the summons because I was so sick of Squall and his grumpy face, but the sidequests in FFX are so downright dull, overlong and pointless that I really cannot be bothered. Blitzball is terrible – I played it through several tournaments, and it never got fun…I recruited one guy with a level 3 sleep tackle, he always got the ball, passed it to one of my strikers, and they always scored. Even when it was balanced, it’s a game of chance and numbers…played…excruciatingly…slowly. And after the hours I played it…my reward was some overdrive moves for Wakka I never used. Great. The chocobo racing was horribly clunky and frustrating, with those bloody seagulls. The monster arena concept was endlessly dull, and even the one zone I did involved fighting 30 annoying enemies to get the last one I needed to come out. And as for dodging lightning 200 times…you must be joking.

The Dark Aeons and Penance I had no inclination to fight. It annoys me that the hidden parts of the game are so ridiculously far ahead of everything else in terms of required level that it’s absurd…and makes a mockery of the regular game, as the tools to help you at that stage are so overpowered that they plough through everything in the final dungeons with absurd simplicity. I can understand Anima taking out all the regular enemies in one hit, but then you get the Magus Sisters who not only could do it three times over, but meant that I have no idea how the final boss fights, because I summoned them and they took out his first form in one hit and his second in an overdrive.

Perhaps it’s because I had recently finished FFXII, but I think this pales in comparison. The fixed camera and weird weightless running animations look poor after XII, and the voice acting is just horrible beside the surprisingly accomplished work there – so bad that when I play X-2, even though I’ve legitimately bought it, I’ll play the ‘undub’. I hate the sphere grid, especially since I ended up taking a couple of my characters down the wrong path with no guidance and they ended up very poor until right at the end. It’s annoying to have to go to its screen after almost every battle as well. I hated the vague shadow of the job system that meant you had to match a certain character to a certain style of enemy, which seemed to me awkward and slow. I hated that weapons only make a difference when attributes are configured. And I really hated how several bosses did not rely on the strength of your characters or intuitive strategies but on your psychic ability to know what statuses they might inflict on you, or what they do when they die. Seriously, there should be no boss that can just inflict a status on you and kill you in one turn, and that I once got a game over screen because I didn’t know that if you struggle inside an underwater boss when its HP is low and kill it, that means instant death for your entire party. Seriously. That’s just extremely poor design.

The graphics didn’t sit well with me, either. I should say that the most positive aspect of this game for me is the character design, especially of Lulu and Auron, who are two of the most visually striking and awesome characters in any game. Summons like Yojimbo and Anima look great, too, and I must say that I find the Magus Sisters to be brilliant despite being quite comedic. Indeed, if you could take Wakka, Tidus and Rikku out of the party and have the Magus Sisters instead, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Despite the nice characters, though, the backgrounds are mostly horribly, horribly repetitive and boring, especially since you don’t get an airship til near the end and even then it mostly makes you trek through areas to get anywhere you want to go anyway. And I haven’t heard anyone else have this problem, but for me the transition between in-game graphics to FMV really jar because to me, Tidus and Yuna especially look like completely different people after the transition…with totally different racial characteristics.

So it doesn’t look nice, sound nice or play well. But with a great story I could forgive that. Well, this ain’t great. Set in a world where the dead don’t go away until they’re ‘sent’, you get one boss who you have to kill about seven million times, yet he keeps coming back. It’s horribly irritating and he isn’t even interesting to begin with. This also leads to several plot twists much less clever than they seem to think they are. A dichotomy between the technologically advanced world of the prologue and the fantasy setting would have been interesting, but it never comes, replaced by some cheap debates underpinning racial prejudice, done very clumsily. And as with XII, the end came too quickly, just as if felt like the story might actually be starting to get good. It never did, leaving FFX best summarised as a trek between a bunch of temples and a big scrap with the big bad guy you know you’ll have to fight from the start.

And that’s not even mentioning how certainty about an afterlife ought to really affect the way death is viewed…

I don’t think I’ll play X-2 that soon. I think I’ll relax with Okami first, then play through Persona 3. Undubbed.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Okami

Okami is one of the PS2 games I bought in Brunei, in the astonishing pirate-tastic store right there in the middle of one of Bandar Seri Baguwan’s main shopping malls – one, indeed, of quite a few like that. It’s been a looong time since then – and plenty of other games from back then remain as-yet unplayed – and I thought it would be a quick and simple game to play through before I started to play something else. I’d seen screenshots and liked the stylised cel-shaded graphics, halfway between anime and traditional brush art, and the apparent RPG elements.

In the end, Okami was both more and less than I had expected. It has plenty going for it, and well deserves its excellent reputation, but its main flaw is that it is just too long. It’s more or less on rails, barring backtracking possibilities for minor hidden goodies, the combat is repetitive and only bosses really provide any sort of challenge. This length makes some of the things that were fun and silly at the start of the game grow tedious, like the mixed-up voices and the way talking animation is heads pulsating away. Some of the character designs are great, but one problem with the nice brush-based aesthetic is that it’s often hard to actually make it out. And I felt a bit put-out that through a good two thirds of the game, I thought Issun was some oily middle-aged pervert, rather than an adorable teenage-looking pervert. Which really does make a lot of difference to how appealing he was!

The story is quite simple: in feudal Japan, the evil snake Orochi has risen again 100 years after his defeat. The mother goddess Amaterasu, in the form of a wolf, must defeat this evil force, and perhaps trace the power back to its source to prevent his return once and for all. Orochi’s defeat this time causes chaos all over ‘Nippon’, resulting in several other demons awakening, leading Amaterasu and her tiny Poncle companion Issun up to the frozen north. It’s very traditional stuff, suiting the brush-like art, but there is some zany humour and an anything-goes mood, including sci-fi elements, anachronistic technology and Carry-On-style smuttiness that makes for an entertaining experience.

Some of the bosses are fantastic in design. My favourites were Lechku and Nechku, the mechanical owls, with hats and little stubby arms at the top of their wings. On the other hand, if anything was repetitive, it was the final dungeon. By then, I think most of the quality testers had given up checking through the translation, and there was a fair bit of confusion between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’, and that sort of error, which struck me as oddly unprofessional for this sort of title. It was doubly frustrating because by that point, I really just wanted to get to the end. Thankfully I’d saved up all my big explosive things, so even the last boss went down easily enough when I got the hang of what was going on.

Overlong and with an unsatisfying climax, it was nevertheless a game full of charm and invention, and well worth playing!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

FINAL FANTASY IX

You can clearly see what Square were thinking. ‘Hey, the last game didn’t work so well because we made it too real, too futuristic, too dull. Let’s do something playful. Let’s go back to our roots.' And thank goodness for that. I haven’t played FFX yet, but FFVIII definitely made me want a break from trying to be realistic and the attempt to have mature storylines.

Thus, FFIX’s world is a slightly silly one. There are rat-people and weird puffy glutton creatures and dwarfs and moogles and best of all, someone went, ‘Hey, you know those black mages we’ve always had? Why don’t we make one a main character?’ Stroke of genius.

And the gameplay got more fun, too. Thank goodness that dreadful magic-drawing system disappeared, and while I always liked the complex, highly customisable materia system from FFVII, it’s fun to see the job classes make a return post-Final Fantasy Tactics, and having each character be capable of a different set of skills kept things interesting, though meant I had some characters I never used at all. Four in a party is better than three as well – though I still prefer Suikoden’s six for turn-based combat!

Shame about the card game. Having an element of chance involved (badly explained) made the games really much too unpredictable, luck being more important than skill.

Characters are a plus here. Having a playful world meant that the characters can be nicely exaggerated. Thankfully, for the first time in a while, a Final Fantasy game got an interesting protagonist in Zidane. Even though he was a smug bastard and I didn’t like him, and even though under his cool clothes and nice hair he looked kinda like Leonardo DiCaprio with dwarfism, I still cared about his exploits – even though I was mostly hoping he’d get a good sharp shock that would make him a nicer person that never really came. I liked Vivi’s (bibi-kun…geddit, Japanese fans?) stuttering, stumbling shyness, and Steiner’s bumbling ineptitude, and Eiko’s hyperactivity, but the other playable characters were left a bit underdeveloped, even our heroine. Wilful, boyish (even facially!) Garnet could have been interesting, but kinda faded into the background after her strong introduction. And I wish I’d known that her name change was gonna be permanent. I expected it to be only for a few scenes, and I thought naming her after a dagger was daft, so I called her ‘Mipsy’ – and she was stuck like that until disc three! Despite being constant tanks in my party, Freya and Amarant got only a token nod in story terms, which was a shame, and Quina was even acknowledged as a bit of a joke in the script.

These characters made the plot enjoyable, even when it got a bit ropey. The opening quests were good, but towards the end it just became typical FF overwrought guff, and badly suffered for having (a) no decent bad guys (Brahe was a perfect mid-boss), but Kuja was just uninteresting and silly-looking) and (b) no cool-factor. (FFVII had Sephiroth, Vincent and the Turks. FFIX has Amarant, who just grunts like a teenager and has a funny-shaped head.) The overall impression of story was a nice basis, some good characters, but then a lack of ideas towards the end making things drag on and on while trying to be clever with a daft story about souls. It was cute and funny – the scenes with the love letter could have been from a very likeable anime – but when it tried to be epic it fell short.

And the translators should have been shot. Localising does NOT mean giving character accents that would make the Pythons say, ‘Tone it down a little, please…’ and slipping in Star Wars quotes. I DID laugh at, ‘No cloud, no squall will keep us apart’, though.

Overall, while it cannot replace FFVII’s place in my heart (entrenched there partially because when you’re 12 you accept faults more easily, I know), this was a lot of fun, a game I didn’t long to finish like FFVIII, and a charming experiment done well. My only real complaint was that it was too easy, and after about 50 minutes’ hard levelling, bosses fall like flies, and even the hidden bosses weren’t nearly the challenge that the Weapons were in FFVII. What WAS Ozma, anyway??

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

FINAL FANTASY 8

Well, last night I got to the final dungeon of FFVIII, so I thought I’d be a bit of a completist and go around getting all the little extras, but when I realised I’d got rid of a card I needed for a crappy subquest, and one of the GF summons would need me to go around hunting obscure monsters for hours to steal rare items from, I gave up, and decided to complete it this morning.

Started at half eleven and didn’t finish until 5 hours later. Should’ve known Square would make an incredibly frustrating, dull and repetitive final dungeon for this frustrating, dull and repetitive game.

It was always going to be hard to follow up something as seminal as FFVII, but Square seem to have kept all the flaws of the previous game without including any of the charm or character, and adding a whole plethora of new problems.

Graphically, of course the game has dated in almost seven years. But really, even for the PS1, the graphics are rather ugly. FFVII had an appealing cartoony style to the general gameplay, and there was obviously a conscious decision to get away from that by having very realistic character design, but the graphics are blocky, the prerendered backgrounds often difficult to navigate and the character animations extremely wooden. The fight scenes are where the focus has clearly gone, with huge summons similar to those of FFVII stealing the show, but of course, getting very dull after the first few times. CGI has progressed a long way, but the FMV sequences were still very nice to look at, if rather few and far between.

But FFVIII falls down in story terms. The characters are very badly portrayed: Squall somehow manages to be less charismatic and more irritating than most mute RPG protagonists, with his mood swings and occasional simian grunts, followed by oodles of angst. I never found a single reason why I (or Squall) should like Rinoa. Zell and especially Selphie were very entertaining, but always seemed like children stuck in adults’ bodies, and never had much of a chance to develop. None of the other characters got any real screentime at all, not even Seifer, whose story arc began as a rival in love and strength, but soon spiralled into that of a peripheral lapdog.

And the story is a mess. The promising initial setting suffers from Star Wars bathos (what seems to be an established institution with great power and influence turns out to be less than a generation old) and also Naruto temporal bias (where are all the other SeeDs who came before Squall and co, and why aren’t they at all important?). The big twists rely on huge leaps of faith, and there was no intriguing villain this time around, just a variety of sorceress figures leading to a very uninteresting climax. The best bit was the video camera sequence in the credits.

Not to say I didn’t have fun. I quite enjoyed going around the world fighting bosses for more GFs. The junctioning system was rather too time-consuming and I bet a lot of players just didn’t bother with it, but if you put some time and effort into it, it made the game very easy. Perhaps a little TOO easy, but I can’t deny the fun of kicking some random monster butt on occasion.

Overall, not a great game, not one I’d ever even THINK about playing again, but I’m glad I at least know what it’s all about now. Next, the 30000th time I’ve tried to play through Suikoden II!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Short note on Arkham Asylum

Unexpectedly finished Batman: Arkham Asylum today, my first PS3 game! I didn’t expect to be finishing it, as I thought the percentage on your saved game was how far through the story mode you were, not how many of the secrets and hidden parts you had found. It was a quick little game, but a lot of fun. I loved the stealth parts and the combat system remained fun right until the end. It was just a shame that it was really too easy, especially at the end.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Tales of Eternia

It took me a long time to play through this game, and that’s because there wasn’t a whole lot to bring me back to it. It had its charm, and was pretty fun to play, just not really fun enough, and badly lacking in a good story, which is what makes an RPG really addictive, even above its gameplay – though poor gameplay can kill even a good story (see Wild ARMS). A straightforward port of a PS1 game, it really doesn’t hold a candle to its sequel, Tales of Symphonia, which I now want to replay more than ever.

A plucky, simple-minded young hero and his two best friends, a feisty girl and a slightly cowardly scholar, find a crashed spacecraft with a strange dark-skinned girl inside, and get involved in an epic quest to stop her world coming crashing down onto theirs. With the usual flying ships and quests for elemental spirits, it’s very much an archetypal RPG story, so what really needs to bring it to life is its characters. And...well, Meredy is cute and Reid is a good leading character, but...well, they’re all a bit boring, the stabs at injecting romance don’t go anywhere, there’s no real impetus for the characters to do anything and none of the bad guys make any impact at all. This is the real problem, and the reason that having seen the weak ending, I now have little interest in going back to get all the attacks I never bothered to learn or go to the hidden dungeon that can only be reached after you’ve finished the game. Not by any means a bad game, but so unimaginative and lacking in character that its replay value is 0.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Kingdom Hearts: Re:Coded

I really took my time with Re:Coded. I was playing it for several weeks, and I think that in this way, I got the maximum enjoyment out of what is after all a pretty poor game.

After the excellent Birth By Sleep, the comparatively underpowered DS was never going to be able to provide a newer sequel that could really compare – especially not by simply updating a throwaway game made for mobile phones that was designed to sit alongside the main plot without advancing it. But that’s what Square Enix offered, with the additional carrot on a stick of added plot nuggets relating to BBS.

So the game itself was strung on an unimpressive piece of plotting: the data Jimminy recorded about Sora’s KH1 adventures got corrupted, so a data Sora is created to help piece the corrupted data back together again, mostly by hitting some blocks with his keyblade and destroying simulated heartless. Of course, the plot develops and become progressively more important to those in the real world it affects, but as a game for a small subset of fandom even in Japan, it was designed not to have any significance to plot.

But interestingly, despite its simplicity and lacklustre graphics, it has actually been the most fun I’ve had with Kingdom Hearts in quite some time – primarily because it is the game you can tweak the most…meaning you can if you wish make it absurdly hard. Birth By Sleep I liked, but it was simply too easy. KH1 had the Sephiroth fight, which remains one of the most fun gaming challenges I’ve taken on in any action game or RPG, but ever since there just hasn’t been anything of comparable difficulty. And though with Re:Coded there is no big bad hidden boss (the closest is a rather easy ‘bugged’ Roxas), the entire game can with the ‘cheats’ that are part of the game be made into a decent challenge, and that is what I enjoyed the most, even if eventually you reach a plateau where simply nothing can come close to challenging you any more unless you simply neuter yourself to a frustrating degree for no advantage.

It wasn’t easy, getting every weapon or quest item, or getting the 20 trophies necessary to see the hidden ending (a nice two minutes offering something of a bridge to KH3, but unsatisfying because it is far too short), and while I really liked the way the game offered minigames for just about each world to keep play varied, some where plain annoying.

The worst game in the series in story terms, no doubt, but for a gamer who actually wants something to play, rather than a story roped to some easy button-mashing fights…well, the other games could learn from the depth here.

But roll on KH 3D, with its Engrishy title, or better yet, BBS Final Mix – hopefully still with the Japanese cast, because I really didn’t like BBS’s dub…even though I’m back to playing it casually until I get to the new hidden boss in the Eng version.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad