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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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.

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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.

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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…

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