Suikoden II

Suikoden is a very important game to me. It was the first RPG that really hooked me, that really made me see how computer games could be a way of telling a good story rather than just being an adrenaline rush. It’s the game that steered me away from beat-em-ups, then my genre of choice, and to RPGs. Yes, I had loved adventure games with RPG elements as early as playing Dizzy on my Commodore 64, but the plotlines there were nothing close to the fully-involving environment Suikoden offered. It was my introduction to the world, and it was only after playing Suikoden that I discovered older classics like Chrono Trigger, and came to wait in anticipation for Final Fantasy VII.

So even before Suikoden II came out, I was excited, downloading the artwork and hearing reports that it was even better than its predecessor. I snapped it up as a US import, and should have played it through years ago.
So what happened?

Well, firstly, I’d sold my Playstation and got a Japanese Playstation 2, expecting to be able to get a mod chip easily, which would have played US and UK games. I never did get that mod chip. I had a Playstation emulator on my PC, but it crashed several times while I was playing Suikoden 2, and finally, various other pursuits just pushed it to the back of my mind.

Well, finally, I’ve played it through. It’s still often heralded as the best of the series (and I have little interest in the ugly-looking 3 and 4), and it was certainly a lot of fun. However, for me at least, it doesn’t come close to the first game.

Yes, perhaps to a degree it’s because I was a lot younger then, and more accepting of cheesy plotlines. But Suikoden 2 is weak in a way Suikoden never was. The original game was a simple story, based on the old Water Margin tales – the son of a general discovers the corruption of the empire he is a part of, becomes part of the Liberation Army and fights against the evil emperor. It was very basic, but it worked, and the characters made it a gripping and moving story, with all sorts of mini-adventures. The second game works similarly – two childhood friends are fighting in the Highland army when the camp is ambushed and wiped out…except of course for our young heroes. It turns out that the brigade was attacked by its own side disguised as the enemy in order to foil a peace treaty (seems clever until you think…why didn’t they just break the peace treaty by attacking the enemy in the first place?). Once again, there is the classic opposition between a young hero who gradually rises up to be a great leader, and a ‘bad guy’. Only this time, the bad guy isn’t a weak figure being manipulated, and doesn’t have much of a story of his own. He’s just a nut. But he’ll do nicely as an antagonist. The problem comes when he gets killed and the hero’s childhood friend becomes the main opposition.

There is just never a satisfactory reason for his continued bad guy status. The writers never seem to be able to make it sound like he really wants to do anything he’s doing, even though he does it anyway. There are a whole bunch of half-hearted reasons why he must keep fighting with the hero, but they all seem so contrived that the suspension of disbelief vanishes, and disbelief comes crashing down on top of your head.

Still, plot aside, there are a plethora of little extras. I played the original for weeks, getting every little extra. Here, I didn’t really bother – not only do I not really want to spend that much time on each game any more, but once I found out that I had already lost my chance to see the scenes with Clive in, I kinda lost interest in being a completist. Nonetheless, I did the vast majority of what’s available in the game, with a guide (because there are 108 recruitable characters, and some of them will only come with you after some VERY obscure conditions are met, like the one who needed an item that only appeared very rarely in one shop), and saw all the different endings, none of which had the sense of drama or closure the original had. Plus some glitch in the game gave me four powerhouse characters at level 99 automatically, so none of the fights were any real challenge at all. And for the most part, the story of the hero’s rise, the little sub-plots, the humorous moments, the way the castle grows and changes as more people join and the fun of the big epic battles made it a very enjoyable experience. And while the translation was really terrible, that provided some unintentionally humorous moments, and I could often tell what the original Japanese was behind some of the odder moments (for example, Jowy randomly says ‘Sorry’, which was probably ‘Warui’, in the context meaning something closer to ‘Thanks, and I’m sorry to be a bother to you’).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of the two heroes ending up on opposing sides. Indeed, it can work really well. It just needs to have a good reason, and be believable.

Probably the best thing about the game, though, is the great character design. The three central characters are all great, and look very pretty. Not sure why, though, but the ones I thought were cutest were the boys that look like girls (Tuta) and girls that look like boys (Wakaba). I just can’t resist androgyny!

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Hatsune Miku Project Diva: Dreamy Theater

I got the first Project Diva game quite a few years ago, now, and the second about as soon as it was available. On the other hand, I got my PS3 relatively recently, and it was only within the last few months that I felt familiar enough with the system to get this game running. It’s not simple in the least, especially if – like me – you want to keep custom firmware on your PSP. Which I did, for while I have a Pandora’s battery, it would be a pain constantly switching back and forth, and I wanted to keep playing my patched ROMs.



Project Diva: Dreamy Theater plays the content you have on your PSP version of the game on the PS3, with beautiful graphics befitting the powerhouse system. That’s about it, though. You can’t unlock songs on there, or use the edit mode. You can’t have a little room for your Vocaloid, or get new costumes. So really, it’s an add-on more than a game in its own right. Not only that, but every time you load the game, you have to plug in your PSP (version 6.20 firmware at least), hook it up to the PS3 using a special program (which I had to download from the PSN because it didn’t want to transfer) and let it recognise that you have a saved game on there uniquely linked to your PSP – ie, not a Prometheus CFW save. The first time took a while.



But I was soon hooked. The pretty graphics are draw enough, and the songs remain a lot of fun. I much prefer playing the rhythm game when the buttons aren’t attached to the screen, and soon was flying through the songs. When I discovered that you had to have at least 39 downloaded edit songs, I initially struggled, but once I had figured out how to get them onto the game had a ball with the silly custom songs others had made, and they ensure I’ll never delete the game even though the rest of the content is included in the sequel. Soon, I had all the trophies except for two remained: one for starting the game 39 times (One reading for 39 in Japanese = Miku) and one for getting a ‘perfect’ on all songs on the hardest setting. The only song left was the Christmas song, ‘Kogane no Seiya Sousetsu ni Kuchite’ (something like ‘Holy Night of Gold Decays into Snow’…), which I knew was formidable. In looking up what the hidden trophies are, I’d found a lot of people complaining about how hard the song is and how they’d tried it for months. I was fortunate, I suppose. Only took me a few tries!



So this is my first game where I have 100% of the trophies (no Platinum here though). And it was a whole lot of fun!

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Patapon 3

Patapon 3 was a big disappointment. I loved the first game, found the system even better in the second even if the story wasn’t as smooth and iconic – and so had high hopes for the third. But the designers ruined everything that was good about Patapon, and made a frustrating game I finished only out of dogged loyalty, not enjoyment.

The first and biggest flaw was that they decided that instead of a full Patapon army, the player could use only 4 units, like the second game’s hero mode for multiplayer. This is the crux of it: in order to be able to expand the whole game to play multiplayer, the concept of controlling a cute and varied army was excised. Well, I don’t like playing Patapon multiplayer – I like playing it on the train. And the whole appeal for me was building up a big army with lots of units for different jobs. To make it worse, the different units aren’t even all fully customisable – apart from the main hero, each has only a limited number of variants. Thus, rather than exploring in depth, I found the class I liked most for each and stuck with it from about mission 5 to the very end of the game. And the spear unit was pretty useless no matter what.

The change in army style also meant a change in gameplay – the ways to lose were for everybody to die (rare except when there were stupid traps) or for your flag-bearing Hatapon to die. Hatapon becomes vulnerable when all units with a shield die. My only unit with a shield was my big, powerful attack unit. Thus the entire game was nothing more than keep-your-tank-alive-or-die. With stupid summons (which are nothing more than dull button-mashing in hopes of ‘perfect’ ratings and cannot be varied without multiplayer) to bring him back to life once or twice.

The difficulty progression was stupid. The difference in power between levels is absurd, to the point that the game overall was ‘die on every attempt until your units go up one level, and then easily beat what was until then near-impossible’. This held true right to the very end, where the last dungeon was horrible at level 29 but a piece of cake at 30.

The minigames that broke up the action are gone. The humour has all but gone – the crazy bosses that raise a smile are repeats from previous games, and the one fun new enemy, a great big ogre, reappears so much he’s soon a bore.

The story makes little sense and seems very carelessly translated. Your soldiers spout the most random nonsense, and the bad guys are semi-coherent. That there are multiple endings based purely on a choice at the end only frustrates. Gone is the charming simplicity of the quest of the first game, or the fun of discovery of the second. A repetitive, weird and dull game I never thought could have been made from Patapon is all that’s left. Such a shame.

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Tales of Symphonia

I started playing the celebrated Gamecube RPG Tales of Symphonia in December 2005, and was pleasantly hooked. I found a cute little adventure story full of hackneyed RPG concepts: the teenaged Lloyd and his silver-haired buddy Genis help their friend Colette to fulfil the prophecy given to her at birth – that she will save the world - and find themselves battling the corruption of tyrannical rulers. Oh yes. The clichés get more and more obvious – Lloyd is the dumb-but-loveable hero, Genis is an elven magician, Colette is a ditzy blonde, and the evil half-elves are turning humans into big wibbly green monsters! Oh no! When Lloyd and Genis attack the testing facility, retribution falls on their village, causing much angst and exile – so the only thing left for them to do is to go and join Colette on her journey to save the world!

Yes, it’s all cheerful, childish, unchallenging fare, done in bold anime style. There’s a beautiful animated intro, cell-shaded SD-style graphics and some adorable character designs – Lloyd and Genis in particular are very cute. Best of all is the voice acting: a step up from most English video games’ dreck, but still very much over-acted, with the Boy Hits Car guy who plays Robin in Teen Titans giving his best melodramatic performance as Lloyd, and his father – a dwarf – boasting a VERY iffy Scottish accent. Still, the ham suits the cheerful tone, and I knew from the start it would all get very angsty later on. Colette has the perfect ditzy American voice, sounding rather like an Olsen twin, and Genis has one of the most adorable boy-voices America has ever managed to record. It all makes me very happy, in the full knowledge that it’s all a bit naff, but naff with conviction!

When I finished it five days later, it struck me that writing an RPG video game must a very individual art form – you have to spin out a story for hours and hours, get your characters from fight to fight and sling in every twist and betrayal and redemption known to man to keep things moving. The story still wasn't great in this game, though. What starts as a nice, slightly preachy story about half-elves and humans discriminating against each other, and the half-elf Desians running human experimentation ranches while keeping the humans suppressed, gets muddled by every half-arsed vaguely-Nordic high-concept twist they can think of. Yeah, there’s, like, this giant tree, the source of all mana, and then this person sealed there, and these other half-elves who’ve become angels, and, like ANOTHER WORLD man, and high technology and magic and dwarfs and ninjas and a sword that holds the whole world together and STUFF! It all feels like someone was only vaguely in control of themselves as they were writing it, so it hops around randomly with only the most tenuous of links and all sorts of magical contrivance. Plus whenever the subject of discrimination comes up, you can tell that the writer is so opposed to it that they just can’t convincingly portray anyone who actually holds prejudices, and it comes across as rather superimposed.

But the characters are great. Typical shounen protagonist Lloyd, more 14 than the official 17, rather thick but utterly good-hearted; sensible, occasionally obsessive teacher Raine; goofy, masculine female ninja Sheena who’s actually very sweet; womanising Zelos who seems pretty flat and annoying at first but actually develops into quite an interesting character; Presea who lost several years of her life and will never get them back – and especially Genis, the cute little child prodigy whose arrogant, bratty streak is tempered by his sheer adorableness and propensity to say things like ‘We’ll be friends forever!’ Bless!

Of course, everyone spends the entire game wracked by guilt over the things they’ve done, endlessly apologising and looking angsty, and it’s all a bit didactic, but hey, I’ve come to expect that of RPGs, and what’s more, the fight system was a lot of fun, so it all worked nicely.

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Enzai

Since I wrote my opinion of the two-episode anime, somewhat shocked at the scenes of bloody rape of a 14-year-old boy and the graphic depictions of non-consensual sexual torture, Enzai surprisingly enough became the first yaoi game ever to be commercially released in the States. Only a handful of visual novels have ever officially made it over here, but I confess to being very surprised that about the only one ever expected to be bought by a (close to exclusively female) paying audience would be the one about prison rape.

But…well, I suppose I was, if anything, exaggerating my prudishness. I’ve read enough fanfictions and doujinshis to know that a lot of porn, for both genders, involves humiliation, subjugation, helplessness and horror, with of course the safety of knowing that it is all fantasy. With writing and drawing in particular, you know no-one is hurt in the making of what you’re watching. And we have to face it at some point, seeing the demand, the endless extremes of the internet, and the fact that I actually went back to Enzai and found that I actually found it kinda hot – call it empowerment, dominance or kink, but there’s something very appealing about non-con.

And thus I have been very surprised at the depth and sophistication of Enzai. It is not deep, nor sophisticated, but is far from the shameless porn I had expected. The first time I played it, I made all the wrong choices (there’s no actual skill to visual novels – you pick a choice and where it leads you will be totally random) and managed to get three ‘bad end’s in a row, which only served to make me think this was brainless smut even more than I already did, with poor Guys suffering really horrible things that definitely didn’t align with any fetishes I have. Also, while I was surprised to see that the mosaic censorship that is required by law in Japan had been removed, at times that only made me despair of some of the artists’ grip of anatomy. The penis cannot be inserted into the perineum!

It’s no more shameful than enjoying the sight of suffering and gore on the screen, which many years have shown us is almost universally approved of by our society. And as I say, I was surprised at the sophistication of the story, and the court case that resolves everything (even if some part of the evidence are daft, like a clever murderer just leaving weapons in a nearby abandoned house for months) is really quite smart.

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Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

I didn’t know what to expect from Revenant Wings, the Nintendo DS sequel to Final Fantasy XII, the PS2 game that as far as I can tell I enjoyed more than most. I liked the sketches I’d seen and I thought there was definitely more story to tell.

In the event, Revenant Wings was more or less a Final Fantasy Tactics game, without the turn-based system. It had c ute sprites, a fun slow-paced strategy system and rather strange video clips that made the characters look like puppets – but was still appealing to look at. The story is also so very different from the tone of FFXII that it feels like something wildly different, which somehow has a lot of charm. It’s like the world of FFXII transplanted into a cute old 16-bit RPG, which suits the sprites.

A year after the end of the main game, and with Vaan now a fully fledged sky pirate, he and Penelo get mixed up in Balthier’s latest pursuit, finding two strange crystals whose power is connected to a kingdom in the sky, and can summon creatures to do the bidding of the stones’ owners. Along with his urchin friends Kytes and Filo, who features extremely briefly in the main game and here receive redesigns and turn out to be quite adorable, along with the slightly more prominent and wily Tomaj, they head to the sky kingdom and meet Llyud, part of a winged race called the Aegyl, currently under attack by the ‘judge of wings’, who looks like the armoured judges of the main game but has no affiliation with them – and is winged.

The game is fun to play, a real-time strategy engine where five characters command little groups and have to meet various objectives. There were little complexities to figure out, which I generally waited until I was getting stuck to tackle, and by the end you have a wide range of characters and so many abilities it can be quite frantic switching between characters to get a good use of the best. It gets very hard at the end if you want to get 100% (and the secret ending, that is frivolous other than developing Vaan and Penelo’s relationship a little), and grinding for the final boss took several hours.

Cute, interesting, fun and actually a challenge unlike most of Square’s portable games, I’m glad I gave this a chance – and it’s made me want to play the updated version of Tactics, as well as its various sequels. After a whole lot of others waiting!

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Final Fantasy XIII

Let’s get this straight first: FFXIII is not a good Final Fantasy game. It’s not even a good RPG at all. Its reviews were oddly laudatory, especially in Japan (Famitsu’s reader poll in 2010 even came out with it as best game ever), while most of my friends and Facebook acquaintances seem to think very poorly of it. In every way that makes a Final Fantasy game special – story, characters and combat system – it fell short. And yet in some small way, I loved it.

I don’t say this with just a cursory playthrough. I put almost as much time into this as I did into FFXII: I got everyone to level 5 in all their job roles, my three main characters all had their final weapons in levels around 90, Fang’s being maxed, I finished every mission and I could farm Long Gui and Shao Long Gui with very little difficulty. This takes a lot of hours, and raises the question – if it’s not a good game to play, why invest so much time into it?

Well, there are a few reasons. Firstly, it is stunningly beautiful. Nothing I have ever played comes close to this. The visuals in this game are the best I’ve ever seen, a step above everything else I’ve experienced even on their generation of incredibly powerful consoles. Several times in the game I actually stopped, put my character somewhere where I could see things from a good angle, and just stared at the backgrounds. I even felt sad that there would be so much fantastic scenery that just goes unseen by the vast majority of players because they don’t take the time to point cameras up or down – and of course, nobody can see everything on a regular run-through. I had to wonder if parts the camera can never see were rendered in such exquisite detail, too, and lamented the lack of a camera that could be properly controlled independent of the character.

Secondly, I liked the characters. Lightning was a refreshing protagonist, being at first rather Cloud- or Squall-like but gradually showing her softer, more human, far more vulnerable side. Fang was a great strong female character. Sazh was likeable and probably the most identifiable character, often clownish but also showing plenty of emotion. And while he’s hated by many, I found Hope adorable. So he whines a lot – watching the death of the person who means the most to you in the world will do that to you. He hit all my protective instincts and by the end he was absurdly powerful (if still crappy HP-wise).

I didn’t much like Snow or Vanille. Snow is the type to go on about being a hero, which never seems a character trait anyone would actually have, and he’s goofy-looking too. Vanille was the main reason I was annoyed there was no option to hear the original Japanese voices (as they had actually taken the time to re-animate mouth movements for the language, which is impressive), only when I actually heard the original cast, Vanille in Japanese was even more annoying than in English. And Hope’s voice was much more generic and obvious. Some cheesy minor villains aside, the voice acting is great.

The story…was weak and limited. In the world of the game, humans live either on the world of Gran Pulse, a dangerous place with a lot of monsters, or in the developed city of Cocoon, which floats above the planet’s surface and is ruled over by a group called Sanctum. This is made possible by the fal’Cie, huge and powerful non-human creatures, who do things like supply air and keep immense spheres aloft. A human who comes into contact with a fal’Cie can become a l’Cie, a branded human who must complete a task or be turned into a monstrous Cie’th. Even if they fulfil this ‘focus’, however, they are turned into crystals. Becoming a l’Cie is essentially a death sentence.

The story begins, as many do, with the evil government performing some ethnic cleansing, repackaged in sci-fi terms. A group of Cocoon residents are being ‘purged’ because they met fal’Cie from Pulse. Most of our plucky heroes meet here: they are being purged or want to find and save someone who is. However, it all goes awry when they meet the wrong fal’Cie and are turned into l’Cie themselves, with a vague notion of their task being to do with Ragnarok, a being who attacked Cocoon many years ago. Most of the game is spent questioning whether they can change their fate, as well as meeting those who seem to be pulling the strings.

The problem with this story is that it severely lacks real impetus. The plot device of a ‘do or die’ mission from barely-understood godlike creatures is a dull contrivance. The end tries to be too clever: apparent bad guy Barthandelus is manipulating l’Cie in a stupid plot that just might bring back a higher god (based on speculation alone), his target Orphan has his own plan to be set free from a tiresome existence which matches up well with what the party were doing and allows for more confusion and less anticlimax, while the party finally make a decision that could well have killed everyone on the planet but doesn’t because of a property of their newfound power there’s no way they could have known would come about. Sloppy.

I was disappointed by the game system. I didn’t like only being able to control one character, and hated how it was game over if just your lead fighter was knocked out. I didn’t like how shallow strategy became. I didn’t like the lack of real challenges: even in the endgame, there’s no real superbosses: the long gui go down as easily as adamantoises, and Vercingetorix was no challenge at all (unless you are going for a five-star rating). In fact, while the mission sidequests take many hours, they are not satisfactory side-quests: they are dull, repetitive, do not flesh out characters and only show the inadequacies of a game without an airship and only substandard teleportation. The last battles were a grind, not a challenge of strategy.

I also disliked the level-up system, a non-versatile and linear version of FFX’s sphere grid. The music often needed to be more dynamic and though lush and sometimes superb, often felt inadequate and needed more contrast. The final level of shifting platforms was plain ugly. I feel this game came close to being good, but didn’t manage it. How will FFXIII-2 fare?

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