Do Not Convert the Tower of Ar Tonelico Into MP3 Format September 3, 2008

Ar tonelico is a surprisingly long game. I didn’t expect it to be a particularly long RPG; it’s not overly convoluted, it doesn’t throw new plot arcs at you all the time, and it’s a dating sim, for goodness’ sake. However, it’s easily a 60-hour game, most of which is taken up by excessively long random battles, and very little of which is taken up by loading screens or aimless walking.

The downside: the gameplay is too easy, despite how long it takes to finish random battles. Only one boss requires any actual strategy, and everything else can be beat as easily– or moreso– by the obvious standard way of fighting normal enemies. However, this default battle strategy is quite different from most RPGs, and I had at least the chance to try something new and unique; just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it isn’t innovative, and it was still a joy to explore because it was new to me.

On the other hand, though, the story and character development far surpassed my expectations. It started out with your typical group of heroes and heroines, just as I’d expected, acting predictable. However, the characters mature quite well, and the game becomes startlingly insightful about two-thirds of the way through. I had not expected any depth or maturity from the plot– as I said, dating sim whose best marketing point is its audiovisual (if not overly technical) prettiness– but I was quite pleasantly surprised.

Overall, I think I enjoyed this game much more than I was expecting to, and despite the long play-time and the lack of challenge, I would recommend it without the reservations I hesitated over previously. The catch is that it takes the characters time to come to mature and thoughtful conclusions; the player has to be patient with their early foolishness, and willing to stick with it.

Cosmosphere: The Dive He REALLY Wants August 25, 2008

I’ve been playing Ar tonelico with a friend, and I’m surprised at how good it is. It apparently wasn’t a popular game, but it’s not bad at all. I admit that the plot is nothing to write home about and the characters’ interactions can be horribly stereotypical (particularly in the dating sim way), but the game is so darned fun.

For one thing, although the battle system does have something of an “old routine” to it, the way I have to strategize for the battles is completely different. At one point I was delighted to find myself up against enemies who couldn’t be hurt by bladed weapons, because it made the battles so much easier. In general, I find myself negotiating between building up three different meters with different types of attacks, and trying not to kill the enemies too soon.

There’s also a fun item creation and exchange system, which makes up for the fact that my heroes are always broke. Besides synthesizing items from various unlikely components, there are characters who sell equippable enhancement crystals, and characters who will find treasures in exchange for them. Juggling my inventory isn’t just a matter of accumulation, but of deciding which items to give up in order to synthesize other ones. The items are tagged with funny commentary from the main character, too, which keeps inventory sorting and management from being boring.

The most novel part of the game, though, is exploring the insides of the characters’ minds; it’s fun to watch the characters grow and resolve their conflicts. At first all of the characters seem like tremendously banal stereotypes, but through the dive system they are revealed to be more complex, individual characters, who change more than the average RPG character does over the course of a game. Even the hero develops, and learns to think rather than blindly swinging his sword.

I admit a fondness for the fantasy/futuristic setting of so many RPGs, and this game is drowning in it. Magical beings, artifacts and spells are more often than not conflated with computers, peripherals and programs. Humans can catch computer viruses, especially if they’re good at magic. And, of course, there are airships. Unfortunately, although the worldbuilding has been well-thought-through, the plot events haven’t, leaving enormous gaping holes of the form “Why can’t the characters just do X?” all over the place. A world where too many things are possible is a world where the heroes can’t get stuck on too many obstacles, and the storywriters weren’t very careful about plausibility, or even about giving the characters realistic reactions to the demands of their quest.

At the very least, it is a pretty game. The individual town backgrounds are lovely, but even lovelier is the soundtrack, which is what interested me in the game in the first place. I would have some reservations about recommending the game, particularly to someone who’s looking for a solid, interesting plot and unique characters, but I would have no reservations urging them to buy the soundtrack. The choral music is epic and uplifting, bright and intense, and the lyrics are written in a fictional language that was made up just for the game, which gives it an ancient, traditional feel. Yet it isn’t somber; it’s catchy and swift, with an active energy behind it. Further, unlike some RPG choral music, it isn’t heavy-handed nor meant to intimidate; it’s light, delicate, and inviting (perhaps appropriate given the dating sim aspect of the game). If there’s one thing about this game that’s worthwhile, the soundtrack is it.

Stuck Behind July 28, 2008

Several days ago, Sasarai and I tried out the Left Behind game. Yes, this is a game based on the poorly-written Christian rapture novel series.

The intro was a cheesy film about the situation of the books, where a lot of people have been raptured up to heaven and no one who is “left behind” really knows for sure what is going on. Apparently even turning to the Christian God for guidance doesn’t necessarily help, because the intro and the game alike are filled with people who have decided post-rapture to become evangelical Christians and are nonetheless still hanging around in post-apocalyptic Earth. The company’s introduction included a re-creation of Michaelangelo’s famous painting “The Creation of Adam” in moderately bad 3-D graphics. I am not normally one to criticise a game just because its graphics aren’t state-of-the-art, but I do think it would have been better if they’d used a picture of the actual painting instead of a 3-D recreation; it didn’t look as nice and they weren’t impressing anyone with their rendering skill.

The premise of the game is that your characters are newly-born-again Christians trying to recruit others to their faith, in a world filled with neutral uninvolved people and evil Satanic rock musicians. You have to recruit others to your cause and train them to help you build your own city, while dodging evil music flung at you by Satan’s minions and trying not to get them stuck behind each other in little groups. The gameplay and interface are somewhat reminiscent of Civilizations, and during the tutorial, I found myself getting somewhat addicted to auto-evangelizing new friends so I could send them off to build more housing (because new recruits have to live in Christian housing, even if you don’t have room for them). Frustratingly, I kept recruiting “Friend Woman” units instead of the male “Friend” units, and the former are only able to do two jobs, neither of which were particularly useful to me; male units, on the other hand, could take any job, and thus were far more useful. My collection of “Friend Woman” nurses in little white dresses couldn’t do anything but stand around outside of the hospital, and I longed to be able to send them off to join the construction workers. So much for encouraging respect for women. Nonetheless, I had my hands full with recruiting and building, and I managed to make interesting progress despite the game’s handicapping the abilities of half my population. I had plenty of busy little deviantly-male bees anyway.

Unfortunately, once the tutorial ended and I started story mode, the gameplay took a nosedive. To survive the first mission, I had to stand in one place and repeatedly wait for the “Pray” command to raise my stats before I was able to safely walk down the street. Beginning a game with the task of “stand here and click this icon every thirty seconds” is not exactly a great hook to get players interested. It improved a little after that, but it seemed like it was going to be at least a handful of missions before I got to do any of the more fun city-building tasks; for the moment it was all about walking down the street without getting hit by evil music. Thumbs down for the slow-to-start-up design. I presume that later on I’ll get to build my base up more and create armies, although I’m going to try not to use the military units because attacking the enemy seems so un-Christian and not in keeping with the premise of the game. At present I’m just trying to figure out how to shake the evil musicians off my tail if they manage to start pursuing me when I only have a handful of civilians to begin with.

Overall I’d say that the gameplay is sort of mediocre, though I can see how it could become addictive later on. But I personally would rather play Civilizations, where the goal is to increase science and development instead of decreasing it via gospel music. Call me a heathen, but I like having the technology to do things like, say, play games.

Brick Breaking for Brokers July 28, 2008

Some friends and I have been playing old Super Nintendo ROMs, somewhat at random. We found a version of Arkanoid called Doh It Again, which is aptly-named given how often one ends up saying “d’oh” while playing it. Perhaps the most notable part, however, is that the fanfare music introducing each attempt at a level is strongly reminiscent of a song from Final Fantasy VI, so much so that I often couldn’t stop laughing every time the level restarted. We joked that they wanted to use FFVI’s music but had to pay royalties by the second and could only afford one bar of it.

Really, there’s not much else to say about Arkanoid. I can, however, attest to having seen some amusing gaming shirts in the past few days, including a “Made in the 80s” Mario shirt and a field guide to the various fungi of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Treasure Troves July 20, 2008

My copy of Final Fantasy III for the DS had been missing for an entire year, so last night I finally broke down and bought a new one. Guess what I found today.

At least I bought some other interesting things that I didn’t already own copies of– I have been on quite the game-acquiring spree lately. For some reason, a lot of PS2 titles and a relative lot of Gamecube titles have been showing up used lately; perhaps this is a big year for people to sell their consoles. The proliferation of good DS titles has contributed to my acquisition as well. Suddenly, there’s a lot that I want. It’s been a good year, but at the same time I’m not feeling any more positive about the gaming industry than I have since the Wii era began; good games are released not in a steady flood but in fits and starts. I might as well pick up what I want while I can, to tide me over through darker times.

Perhaps the most unusual find was actually purchased not by me but by a friend; I spotted a box set of Ar tonelico, which is going for around $70 on eBay, being sold for $40. For my part, I was amused by the font on the side of the box; it was reminiscent of old Atari games. Imagine a game whose plot revolves around music, with a soundtrack of Atari 2600 chiptunes and a harem of girls with 25-pixel faces.

A Bland Lunch Arranged In A Beautiful Bento Box July 14, 2008

I’m still too early in to judge the plot of Tales of Phantasia (and we’re putting it on hiatus for a while, though we do intend to continue eventually), but I’ve formed a pretty solid opinion on everything else: namely, that everything other than the plot is great. Even the high encounter rate is compensated for by the quickness of battle– often finished by a companion’s spell before you have time to locate your enemies, though in longer battles you are actively engaged with the system– and the fast loading time, for which my standards have been lowered in this day and age of wanting to show off graphics. The game is quite lovely, atmospheric, and fun to wander around in; the battle system is interesting; the dungeons are home to little cave-dwelling creatures as special effects rather than enemies; your heroes actually eat to regain their strength; even the economy makes a little more sense than in most RPGs.

As for the plot, it’s really hard to overlook its dullness; it revolves around a lad with an overdeveloped sense of vengeance and his cliche-ridden quest to deal with his vendetta, while incidentally saving the world if that happens to occur on the way. My inner storyteller squirms. But the rest of the game is worth appreciating.

I’ll Tell You About Your Special Pendant When You Get Back July 10, 2008

More retro goodness: I’ve been playing Tales of Phantasia for the first time on a Super Nintendo emulator. I’m impressed by the soundtrack (full-length vocal songs in a SNES game, really?) and the beauty of the low-saturation, high-intricacy sprite-based graphics. It’s a beautiful game, and a lush, evocative world to explore, which wins a lot of points from me.

I am bemused by the battle system. One look at the battle screen makes it appear to be a Final Fantasy clone, and that’s more or less what I expected, but it’s nothing of the kind; it has reflex-based battles with 1-D movement projected onto a 2-D screen with an impressively well-done illusion of a 3-D background. It’s different from the same old thing, but the battles are easy. At least they go by quickly, which is a good thing because the encounter rate is extremely high. If the battles weren’t so short, I think I would forget which way I was walking several times on my way through each room– the constant interruptions are awfully distracting. I’m tempted to use the holy potions of monster avoidance, but my characters are levelling up at a steady pace, and I don’t want to end up walking around in circles to level up for a boss later on.

As for the plot, naturally I can’t comment with any accuracy until I finish the game, but so far it has been so stereotypical it’s actually almost funny. It needs imaginative elaboration by the player to be at all memorable; every plot point is so predictable it feels like it came from putting other SNES RPGs in a blender. The translation, a fan work by DeJap, is full of anachronisms and the occasional immature joke, which, far from helping me relate to the game, feels wrong for the Renaissance-era European fantasy setting and distances me from the idea that these characters are real people. I don’t have a sense that a classic is being desecrated by it, however; the story is sufficiently banal that I don’t think I’m missing much.

It’s hard to say at this point whether I’ll stick it through and finish the game; it’s got a combination of very good aspects and very bad ones. I had assumed it must have done well to blossom into a huge series, but perhaps the graphics are its strongest point; and while they are impressive for their time and do create a lovely atmosphere, I’m not sure whether that’s enough to carry the game to its finish for me.

The Legend Goes Ever On July 7, 2008

Please forgive the recent lack of updates. Major events in my offline life have taken precedence, but I hope to get back into my regular groove now.

Justin and I have been playing through Super Demo World– or rather, I’ve been playing while Justin looked on and made fun of me for falling into pits and getting chomped by piranha plants. Super Demo World: The Legend Continues is a hack of Super Mario World that incorporates many elements from Super Mario Bros. 3, and feels a bit like an extension of both. Although it’s “just” a fan hack, it’s a complete game by itself, and every bit as engrossing as the original SMW.

We haven’t quite gotten 100% yet, though we are close; this game is tricky. It was supposed to be “an example of what [the hacking tool] Lunar Magic can do”, but in fact it’s also an example of what SMW’s own game rules could do, and didn’t. The structure of SMW, the available possibilities, the items and techniques, weren’t fully explored even in as many levels as the game had, and SDW takes it to the next level by exploring a large handful of those– feats we might have been asked to pull off in SMW, but weren’t. Add to this various nostalgic homages to SMB3 and a trick or two from SMB1, as well as a scattering of new items to keep things fresh, and you get the feel of a game designed by people who loved the original games inside and out, and knew what made them great.

Of course, the game doesn’t take itself so seriously that it’s above humour. The original plot, rescuing the unhatched baby Yoshi eggs from Bowser’s evil clutches, has turned into a mildly disturbing quest for breakfast omelettes. And the ending– well, you’ll have to see that for yourself. It’s not worth more than a suggestion of parental guidance, but seeing my childhood skewered was not my favourite part of the game. I doubt anyone would find it upsetting, at least no more than a peeing Calvin sticker on the back of someone’s SUV; it’s simply aimed towards a dark sense of humour that I unfortunately do not share, but which may amuse many players; so, let that be your guideline for suitability.

I would highly recommend this game to anyone who grew up on SMB3 or SMW; it strikes just the right balance between challenging enough for an experienced player, and easy enough to be reasonably completed. The developers clearly wanted people to find the secrets; they just didn’t want to make it too easy. “Oh no, they didn’t!” sums up my reaction to the skills required, an expression of combined appreciation, enthusiasm, and gaping dismay; but I was never really stuck beyond my ability to proceed. And, after all, the developers knew when they designed it that gamers might make use of save states, so I consider them fair game. In the end, I’m simply glad for the chance to further explore the horizon of possibilities.

[Edit: We've now completed all 120 exits. It was satisfying.]

It’s Like Flatland All Over Again June 14, 2008

So, like I said the other day, the second Phoenix Wright game, Ace Attorney: Justice For All, surpassed any standard I’d ever expected it to meet near the end. I will try to explain why without giving away too much. See, the Ace Attorney series is pretty much a comedy, a silly comedy with broadly-drawn caricatures who have names like “Dick Gumshoe”, “Wendy Oldbag” and “Lotta Hart”. You don’t take these people that seriously. They shave their faces with a knife while testifying, and spirit channeling by a medium is legal evidence (as is anything the witness says, but only if they say it in green.) One-dimensional is what we’re looking at, here– no change or development. They aren’t even lines, just points. Funny points. But points.

Justice For All began hinting at a bit of development for Edgeworth. Just a touch– that he changed his tune for some reason, and became a different person. Then we launch into the final case, and suddenly the whole game takes on three dimensions. It gets complex. Not only do people learn and grow, but there’s more than one way for them to decide. There are serious moral dilemmas without any easy answer, and the player is forced to make the choice. I can count on one hand the games that I’ve seen do this. This is pure, three-dimensional, not-one-simple-direction development for Phoenix and Edgeworth. Standing ovation from me.

In other Wright-related news, I mentioned the other day that I felt bad for Gumshoe because he’s a pretty good detective, and Karl objected (heh) that he’s not that great. Well, I countered, he always gives us useful evidence when we need it, even if he does always accuse the wrong suspect. Then I thought– wait a minute. He’s a detective. Accusing the wrong suspect is a pretty big flaw in that. Why did I think he was good nonetheless? It took me a while to puzzle this out.

Then I realised two things. One, accusing the wrong suspect is a gameplay constraint. The police department always gets the wrong person in the beginning. They have to (with special exceptions, but I said I wasn’t going to give too much away). It’s not just Gumshoe who gets the suspect wrong; it’s the whole world; and that’s because otherwise there’d be no game. So I’d been automatically forgiving him that flaw on the basis that even Sherlock Holmes would have to accuse the wrong suspect if he turned up in a Phoenix Wright game; that’s how it works. Two, though, Gumshoe presumably doesn’t know he’s in a work of fiction, so what he’s doing is accusing the most likely suspect. That’s what anyone would do, given that they didn’t know there are no easy open-and-shut cases to be had and that the likely person never turns out to have done it. I’m sure that, upon finding some strong evidence for a certain suspect, I’d accuse them too. Gumshoe operates by Occam’s Razor, and that’s a pretty sensible way to go about detecting, unless one knows they’re in a mystery that has to be complex.

Another Boy Meets Another Girl June 12, 2008

I’ve been fairly busy with non-game-related matters, but I’m nearly halfway through the third Ace Attorney game, so today I picked up Apollo Justice– I have to feed the addiction. Sometime I mean to blog about the ending to the second game and why I think it was a huge leap in quality for a series that I was already enjoying, but for now you get a quick critique of love stories.

Sasarai and I have been discussing Tidus and Yuna (or Tuna, as I hear the shippers have amusingly labelled it) from FFX. Specifically, the two seem to have very little in common, and we were wondering what could make this relationship tick. What I’ve been thinking is that perhaps they aren’t compatible at all– perhaps they are in love with the idea of love itself. Tidus has always been so popular, he may have been more interested in impressing lots of girls than in really devoting himself to one beloved person, and Yuna likely hasn’t explored relationships too much because everyone acts like it would be selfish given her future. So perhaps neither of them has ever been in a serious relationship, and suddenly they’ve realised how nice it would be to be in one– the rush of love itself, without necessarily any foundation or strong connection to the other person to back it up. It would be quite easy, especially for teenagers as naive as that, for them to mistake interest in love itself for interest in the other person. Perhaps what they love is the idea of being in love with each other, which doesn’t bode well for a lasting relationship.

I think that Squall and Rinoa from FFVIII have a similar lack of apparent compatibility, but the big difference is that FFVIII isn’t just a love story, it’s a story about love. Its theme is love– as Square told us from the very beginning– and it explores people’s insecurities and problems relating thereto. If Squall and Rinoa don’t last, that doesn’t make the whole relationship futile; the point is that Squall has learned that it’s okay to love and trust someone, and it will always be good that this has happened. This lesson is far more important than whether this particular teenage relationship lasts forever. Tidus and Yuna, though, don’t make any such personal progress through each other. They’re just two teenagers with hormones in overdrive, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Where I’m going with all of this is that there is a good way and a bad way to do love stories. Most RPGs have them; Final Fantasies make a good example because they often completely revolve around them; but they’re not often done well, despite the huge amount of focus they tend to get. Need a plot element, a motive, or a sidequest? Add a romance! (It’s either that or cloning.) Romance is so often used as a MacGuffin that the ones with the most justification tend to be the incidental ones between minor characters, the ones which do not serve a plot function and seem to happen in the background just because those two characters have so much in common (since we’re pointing at Final Fantasy, I’ll nominate Beatrix/Steiner as an example). The worst ones are often the ones that drive the main plot; in order to make the heroes relatable, developers tend to make their interactions so generic that they are rarely unique, memorable, or driven by anything that could show a very private bond between them. Such a bond would be exclusionary of anyone else, including the player, which I think the developers try unduly hard to avoid. And we can’t share in the hero’s experience of love anyway; the game can dramatize all it wants, but it can’t guarantee that we will fall in love with– or even like– any given character. But because it’s the main plot, it drags on… and on… and on.

I think it’s no wonder that many of us– myself included– groan when the main plot of a game turns out to be a love story. They’re so often generic in a way that leaves one cold and emotionless, watching some teenager embrace the lovely girl beneath the setting sun in a dramatic cut scene while the music swells, and thinking, I need to remember to equip her before we leave town. If the developers can’t do better than this tell-don’t-show expression of love and bonding and personal connections, they should stay away from love stories and get back to the part about saving the world already. Most of us probably don’t want to sit through a love story unless it’s a good one.