The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker

The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker was not really worth the time I spent on it. It was a very long game, as a matter of fact – a lot of gameplay hours, which is usually a good thing, but that’s only if there’s a really good plot driving things. Here, unfortunately, the game got rather repetitive and the delays I encountered weren’t because of taxing puzzles that really made me think, but because so much of the game is spent sailing about, looking for tiny little islands or even moving cyclones, without which you cannot progress. Some of the things you had to find were really quite obscure – in the end, I resorted to using a guide.

Let me explain the way I like to play RPGs. In the old days, when I was quite the little computer geek, I would play a single game tirelessly for weeks on end, until every last secret, every last event had been discovered. I would always play it through once on my own, agonising over the difficult bits until I solved them, and wouldn’t check an online guide unless I had been truly stumped for days on end. After that, I would play again with a walkthrough, and make sure I collected absolutely everything there was to collect.

So, after all 108 allies in Suikoden were assembled, and Cloud and gang had a gold chocobo and could summon the Knights of the Round Table in Final Fantasy VII, I was satisfied. I played a dozen or more others, but those two remain my favourites, followed by Chrono Trigger and Wild Arms, though the latter was let down by a painfully slow combat system.

Well, games drifted out of my life in my later teens. I blame the quality of the games for this! And the fact that I made the dubious decision of buying a Japanese PS2. Anyway, these days I only play once, normally on my own, resorting to a guide if I get stuck for about an hour.

I play for the story, and pursue any sub-games I stumble upon until they get dull. So in The Windwaker, for example, I found The Nintendo Gallery (a silly, endless sub-game where you take photos of all the characters in the game), but didn’t bother taking many photos. I went to various hidden island, but needed someone to tell me where to find the ones I needed to get to in order for the game to continue. It’s the most satisfying way, and I just end up feeling that there are better things to do if I play for too long.

The game wasn’t a bad one by any means. It’s a good, solid combat system, which means you don’t have to go through the tedium of levelling up all the time. The story starts out much like any other RPG: the young hero’s sister is kidnapped, and in the attempt to rescue her, he stumbles across an evil plot that threatens the world, and discovers his true destiny. Unfortunately, it pretty much remains as generic as that, and at no point did I particularly care about my little neo-Link (who I called Link anyway) or his little friends. This wasn’t because of the cutesy graphics – they’re fine by me, and a lot more detailed than FFVII’s Cloud ever was, not to mention the sprites of Suikoden! I would perhaps have preferred something a little less twee, but that’s what the upcoming sequel will deal with, I’m sure.

No, it was the lack of anything to really interest me plot- or character-wise, and the repetitive structure (collect so many of these, then so many of those, and fight the same 10 or so baddies over and over again) that were the disappointments. Plus the fact that the game was very easy, despite its length. Oh well! Tomorrow I shall try something new! The game invited me to start all over again (with a worrying moment where the main character is given invisible clothes…but that only meant he stayed in his regular outfit, not that there was going to be some sort of nude mode, which REALLY wouldn’t suit this game!), but I don’t think there’s much appeal to that!

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The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

Even in 2005 this game was showing its age, and not just in terms of graphics. Perhaps it’s because I was used to the refined control system in The Wind Waker, but it was just incredibly frustrating. Fiddly, often badly-designed and with enemies that were supposed to be tricky but were just stupid, I soon got rather bored. And Navi was not only annoying but bloody useless at doing her job in battle. Too much block-pushing, too: bad memories of Tomb Raider. I resorted to a guide soon after Link became an adult. On the plus side, the story was rather better than The Wind Waker’s, if still not exactly a Square epic. And the biggest plot twist…well, unfortunately, playing Super Smash Brothers had already given it away – and other than that, it was all pretty generic.

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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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