Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright

I feel like it has been years and years since I first heard of this game. I remember very much liking the look of the trailer when it was released – which was also the first time I found out that in Japan, Phoenix Wright has the somewhat hilarious name of ‘Mr. Naruhodo’. In the eventuality, very little of what was in that original trailer made it into the final game intact, but the general concept remained, including the excellent central prospect of making the game about witch trials, including a setting very much recalling The Crucible.

The general idea of melding these two series was a good one. The gameplay of both has always been fairly similar, especially in the early DS games: static (or almost static) scenes could be searched on the touchscreen to advance the story. The crucial differences, of course, being that in Phoenix Wright this led to a trial and in Professor Layton it led to puzzles. The game does the obvious and satisfying thing of having both: as you search for clues to the next trial, you are given numerous puzzles. As I enjoyed every Layton game and the first Phoenix Wright games, this suited me well.

Yes, the character designs between the two games are very different. Layton recalls cutesy European comic book art while Phoenix Wright is more typically anime-style. But the fact that the two kind of clash is actually quite charming, and I like the way the characters from each world have a different ‘speech noise’ for the lines that aren’t read by the actors.

The story is fairly predictable but well-executed. Professor Layton receives a letter telling him about the mysterious city of Labyrinthia and how one girl has escaped – but is on the run from witches with formidable powers. Professor Layton attempts to keep the girl safe but after various magical events (that aren’t actually explained in the main story and then handwaved a bit in an omake sequence) she is taken back to Labyrinthia – as are Layton and Luke.

The girl manages to get caught up in a trial, and is defended by Phoenix Wright and Maya, who also manage to get themselves caught and taken to Labyrinthia. Thus begins an adventure that largely features dramatic witch trials and a mysterious ‘Storyteller’ who distributes pages to the citizens of the town that unfailingly tell the future.

Now, every Layton game since the first has essentially relied on the twist that the inexplicable events happening in the story are in fact explained by imaginary technology (indistinguishable from magic…), so the way this story unfolds ought to be no great shocker to anyone. And also may bring to mind a minor M. Night Shyamalan film. But there were a few things in the big unveil at the end I didn’t see coming, mostly to do with relationships between different characters.

There were a few things that don’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s no good reason the Storyteller doesn’t just remove Layton and Luke from Labyrinthia as soon as he becomes aware of them. One trial – featuring a very appealing girl-disguised-as-a-boy character – doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny well once all the secrets are revealed, making the player wonder how someone could have known to ‘stop time’ and, presumably, disassemble part of a wall. It also kind of skips over the fact that a very real attempt at murder happened, and was averted only by chance. Then there’s the way nobody really has any objections to the way they’ve been made to live, even the ones who have had years of suffering.

Nonetheless, the game is interesting throughout and has a wonderfully atmospheric setting and very entertaining characters, especially all the crazy witnesses and the quirky librarian. Overall, I felt the game was markedly easier than any previous title in either series I’ve played, and graphically Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy had much nicer-looking polygon models, but the novelty of this game, its interesting setting and engaging characters, make it a whole lot of fun. I also very much enjoyed the little omake episodes included as DLC, each with an easy little puzzle.

I would love more of this idea, really. I guess I’d just love another full Layton game, not a weird smartphone vampire game. I’m also not at all sure that Youkai Watch will be a satisfactory substitute. I guess I’ll just have to patiently wait to see what I get!

And you know what? I’d really love a feature-length animation of this crossover! That’s something I’m pretty certain I’ll never see, though. Alas! 

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Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

I play quite a lot of Square Enix’s remakes. I still need to pour more hours into both Kingdom Hearts updated versions and I’ll almost certainly get the updates for Final Fantasy VII and XII. But this one was not only a disappointment, but by far the game I’ve enjoyed least in the Final Fantasy series. Yes, less than XIII or XIII-2.

I probably should have researched the game a little more before I bought it. I didn’t really know anything about it other than that it had an extremely pretty protagonist and was set in the Fabula Nova Crystallis universe. Because, you know, after FFXIII everyone just loves all that vague and poorly-explained lore about l’Cie and Black Tortoise Crystals. Not satisfied with how vague and unnecessarily complex this world is, the game infodumps a complex political situation about warring nations on you, introduces artificially-created life forms in an academy where if a person dies, all memories of them are erased from the minds of those who knew them and a backstory about the events your playing having been repeated millions of times already that you have to trawl through text entries in a library book to uncover.

All this I could forgive if it had framed a good game that was fun to play and full of engaging characters on an interesting journey. Sadly, the failure of these elements are where the game really became my least favourite in the entire series.

First, the game was horribly clunky and at no point became fun as a gaming experience. This may have been a fairly decent game for the PSP, but contained many of the drawbacks of Crisis Core without the advantages of a compelling atmosphere and engaging characters. The limitations of the system mean the main structure of the game is awful – the action parts are very repetitive and linear fights occasionally mixed up with some vaguely more strategic segments in the world map, but far worse is the way the game is divided into missions. This means that between combat sections, you are in a very basic school with a clunky portal teleporting you to different locations, where you can complete pointless and often very long-winded tasks for very little advantage and next to no character development. Things like the characters’ running animations and the straight edges of many locations betray the simplicity of the source, and the lazy update means not only have only textures been updated rather than entire models – resulting in very jagged or simplistic vehicles and buildings – but several minor characters have only very lazily been updated. It’s embarrassing when some old councilwoman comes to see the main characters – who have actually been updated to look current-gen – and she looks like she’s arrived from the wrong game altogether.  

The game design is also poor. Apparently by intention, you can pick members for your team that make it impossible for you to complete some missions. For example, you can choose characters who have no long-range attacks for missions that require them, or not equip any magic and go into a restricted section that automatically kills you for using any physical attacks. And then you have to go back to a save point ages before. Apparently the idea is to become familiar with your team, but it’s absurd not to even forewarn you that some choices make the game impossible. This isn’t what playing very difficult old games was like: back then, you knew you had to develop skills to win. Here, skill is not involved.

The balance is also terrible. I levelled characters evenly for a while, but then just decided to train only Cater, and she soon stomped everyone and the game was stupidly easy – unless you are surprised by a level 99 monster on the map, in which case you just have to watch your character die. Not once did I find a boss battle a satisfying challenge.

There is also an option to start the game with all enemies 30 levels above you, which I chose and regretted because it meant I kept dying in one hit and had to spend ages killing even basic enemies. There’s giving players a challenge, and then there’s just making them endure tedium until they finally match the enemy levels, at which point the difficulty ends up the same as it would have been normally in any case.

So the game wasn’t fun and the world-building was complex and confusing. How about the overall story? Unfortunately it’s clumsy too, unfolds in a very dull manner and keeps every character at arm’s length. There’s very little to find interesting in the battles between the armies of different nations or the self-sacrifice of some major players, none of whom are actually interesting. There’s really no reason to care who becomes ‘Agito’ in a quest for some vague extra powers, or stopping the incredibly uninteresting Cid. And the way that the story is delivered not through surprises and quests and discoveries, but dumped on you like clockwork after each mission is a pain. Especially since leading up to the mission has been the extremely boring school day where you desperately look around for ways to pass the time, and hope chocobo breeding will actually become interesting at some point (it doesn’t, even if the babies are incredibly cute).

Which only leaves the main characters of Class 0. Twelve of them are artificially-created warriors with impressive fighting prowess and the ability to resist magic jammers and be brought back to life if they fall in battle. In a naming scheme that wasn’t even cool when Gundam Wing did it, they each have a name based on a number, or more specifically a playing card. Thus, you have names like Cinque and Trey, plus Ace, Jack, Queen and King – though inexplicably no number 10. Essentially, they are Organisation XIII, but instead of having clichéd bad-guy personalities they have clichéd anime high school character personalities (there’s the rough-speaking one, the know-it-all one, the Iinchou, the class clown, the air-head etc etc), and instead of looking flamboyant and distinct, they all look like very pretty pop stars with amazing hair. Added to this are the incredibly uninteresting Machina and Rem. Machina is basically Riku, embracing his dark side for the power to protect others, and Rem is basically a plot device who – cough! cough! – has an incurable disease slowly killing her but that she can keep secret.

The fact they’re almost aggressively a collection of stock characters, as well as not having any real past, makes them very hard to identify with or like. They’re put on a pedestal from the start, but it doesn’t make them insecure or vulnerable or anything else that might humanise them. They just plod through their missions and spout occasional lines that keep their personalities completely on the straight and narrow. And though most of the weapons are what you’d expect – guns and swords and spears – when you get to the flute and the mace and the main character with zappy playing cards, it feels a bit desperate. And I felt bad for poor Eight, the small cute one with only his fists to use.

I did start to like them – at the very, very end in the one scene where they actually show some development. But that was in the ending sequence and far too late. And yes, I’ll happily concede that they’re gorgeous and I love the aesthetic Square have developed of incredibly pretty characters who look like the prettiest biracial kids you ever could see with lovely floppy hair. But I wish what they had done with them had made them likeable and interesting. Instead, the only thing I can say was a success here was the designs of this specific group in this game – not overall character design. In all other aspects, I felt that Type-0 fell badly short, and most assuredly had no place being on a current-gen console. 

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Fighting Season - A First test game

For once, I haven´t played Chain ofCommand… at least Second World War :-)

Today I have played for the first time Fighting Season, the incoming rules for Modern Warfare by TooFatLardies. Our gaming group signed for the play testing a couple of months ago but only today we have been able to put a more or less decent table (with houses, walls and fully painted minis...) to play the rules.

This is a full brand new and self standing set of rules, not just a Chain of Command with some adaptations; therefore, those familiar with the Second World War rules won’t have (I least I didn´t have) much problem in mastering the game. However, from the tactical point of view there’s very little resemblance between the two sets.

The approach taken by the designers (Richard Clarke and military historian & wargamer Leigh Neville) was to go from bottom up and in a full Lardista style, study the key drivers of the small/skirmish combats in Iraq and Afghanistan and then develop the rules.

Once upon a time in Helmand...

In this sense, the rules include full new terrain features typical of the area of combat (irrigation ditches, crop fields, flat roofs in the compounds’ houses…) in addition of course to the very different weaponry. Each army participating in this conflict has its own specific chapter (not just OOBs and supports) to enable a reasonable simulation of their intrinsic fighting conditions and tactics.

In that sense, for example, the same terrain feature (for example, climbing a hill) affects in a total different way to the Taliban (who can move freely due to its better knowledge of the geography) than to the coalition forces (being broken ground due to the burden of weight carried by the modern soldier).

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