The Return of the Video Games Thread

[bloop]

The PC version isn't really an option for me since my PC is simply not sprightly enough for a game like that. I will say, though, that the metacritic average is the same for the PC and console versions of the game, but I can completely understand a preference for keyboard+mouse controls.

[Vlad!]

HG101 reposted an excellent interview about classic game The Lost Vikings. I had somehow forgotten (if I ever knew) that it was developed by Blizzard in a previous incarnation.

The money quote is here:
"Working on Vikings helped us remember the big picture: that a game, first and foremost, should be fun to play…that it should feel good and look good. "

I have about four thousand words about Persona 4 and I would like to get it down to about a thousand. Maybe I'll have time for some editing this weekend.

[Vlad!]

I remember playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time for the SNES with my brother back in the day. As the title suggests, the game involves a lot of time travel, but at the end you go to "present day", which was (as I recall) 1992. We would laugh about this while we played it several years past that date.

Persona 4, interestingly enough, takes place in 2011. Being a calendar-based game, the calendar actually follows this year's calendar. Kind of a side note, but still cool.

I don't say that my opinion has changed since my previous writings on the subject, so I'll elide a truly unnecessary number of words here which were basically just more of the same. However, I do feel like I should mention that some of these frustrations may be my own fault. While it is true that the slice-of-life portion of the game gets a bit old and the dungeons get pretty tedious. the game offers you the option of interspersing the two. Unfortunately, doing so does carry a cost, and in order to make the most of the game you really should do the dungeons all in one go, which of course I did. The downside is the aforementioned frustration.

The other immensely annoying thing is that this game pretty much requires a FAQ or strategy guide or something. Most of the fetch quests are incredibly boring and take the form of "go into some dungeon (we might, if you're lucky, hint at you which one) and then kill some enemy (we won't tell you which one or where to find it) and get some item". If you have the patience of Job you might be able to get through most of these, but unless you're taking notes (which I highly recommend for this game) you *will* either give up on the quests or give in and use a FAQ.

The above is just one example, however. Many of the dialog trees are insanely difficult to navigate, and if you hope to max out all your social links (which I don't recommend trying on your first playthrough), you either have to be a freaking mind reader or use a guide.

And of course, there's the ending. There are a number of endings, varying from horrifyingly bad to the One True Ending, and getting the latter almost necessitates a guide of some sort. I got a bad ending (which was so depressing it made me want to shut the TV off and cry myself to sleep--and it wasn't even the worst ending!), then managed to get a good ending. I assumed that I had gotten the good ending...until I looked on the Internet and realized that there's a Super Secret Hidden REAL Ending that I missed, and of course like a noob I saved my clear data over my final savegame, so if I want to see it I'll have to play through the whole thing again! Ouch.

Speaking of which, the game does have a New Game + but it feels like a complete gyp. You don't keep your level, your items, your social link ranks, OR your personas. You can keep your "traits", five stats which control which items you can choose in dialog trees, which does make the conversation part of the game easier (in fact, I believe it's impossible to get those traits high enough to choose some dialog options on your first play through), but that's poor consolation.

Now that I think about it, I believe what makes the town segments so tedious is that you have to talk to every single person all the freaking time. You never know when some random NPC is going to up and give you a quest, but most of the time they just say the same inane thing over and over again. And each one has enough personality to be distinguishable from each-other, but each one is also entirely one-dimensional. I realize there's just not enough time in the development schedule to make all 40 or so regular NPCs actually fully interactive and fleshed out, but when you encounter a townsperson who says "I really want to meet Naoto" and Naoto is not only a member of your party but standing just one screen over, the fact that you don't have a "OK, let's go" option kind of breaks immersion.

(Speaking of breaking immersion, it's sometimes annoying when it feels like I'm forced to be dumb. Near the beginning, you see one of your classmates in a pink kimono. Then later she's interviewed for the local news wearing a pink kimono. That same evening you see a shadowy figure in a pink kimono, and your dumb-as-dirt party member says "Hurr, who was that?" and the game makes you answer "I dunno". Really? Apparently I'm roleplaying someone who had his brain surgically removed and replaced with a bowl of tapioca pudding. Awesome to the max.)

I have a hard time truly hating Persona 4, though, because it's not bad so much as old school. Most of these complaints could be leveraged against so many of the games from the Famicom and even Super Famicom era, which is where the first few Megami Tensei games came out (which, by the way, were so much harder than Persona 4 it's not even funny).

Plus, the game isn't all broken glass and used syringes [note to self: find some better metaphors]. The characters are charming, funny, and likeable. The story is gripping and surprisingly cohesive given its long arcs (there are a few dangling plot threads, but I suspect they get cleared up in the One True Ending so I'll reserve judgment on that for now). The battle system is surprisingly well-designed. The music is pretty good (if a bit repetitive in places). And the voice acting doesn't make me want to stab my ears with a rusty spork, which is about all I can hope for from voice acting.

I have a lot more random comments on the game, but at this point I feel like I've talked around it enough. I don't know if I'll end up playing through it again just to see the good ending (I'm sure I could watch in on YouTube if I really cared), because (like this review) it's a freaking long game. I think my clear file was just over 70 hours, which is an embarrassing amount of life to spend on a video game. But obviously I enjoyed it enough to stick with it for that long, which is saying something right there.

[whim]

I remember playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time for the SNES with my brother back in the day. As the title suggests, the game involves a lot of time travel, but at the end you go to "present day", which was (as I recall) 1992. We would laugh about this while we played it several years past that date.

Pretty sure I remember playing that! Fun times.

[Vlad!]

I experienced an awesome glitch today. I was waiting for a friend so I played a round of Mario Kart DS. I was well in the lead when some communist pig shot off a blue shell. But right at the same time as it hit me, I was hit by a red shell. Luigi did a spin out (like what happens when you hit a nanner or brush the edge of the blue shell blast) and kept driving. I even kept my item. It was glorious.

Makes me wonder if I could deliberately drive into a minor hazard (like a nanner or a track hazard like a goomba) and avoid the brunt of a blue shell. It would probably take exquisite timing.

[bloop]

There actually is a way to avoid the blue shell, but I never got the timing down consistently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB-Q-507Htk

[Vlad!]

Very interesting...I'll have to try it out next time a communist swine tries to distribute the wealth.

[bloop]

Ni no Kuni Studio Ghibli/Level 5 collaboration. Looks fantastic!

[Vlad!]

Ni no Kuni Studio Ghibli/Level 5 collaboration. Looks fantastic!

Yeah, I saw that it was finally announced for a US release! I'm super excited about it. I was really bitter that it wasn't making the journey overseas, but I think enough people made enough ruckus that they decided it was worth a port. Maybe I'll buy two copies just to inflate sales figures

[bloop]

I didn't even know about it until they announced a release stateside, which is probably a good thing. Ruckuses are bad for my blood pressure.

[Vlad!]

Yeah dude. The DS one was released in Japan like a year ago (I don't think the DS one is coming to the US at all, which is sad).

[bloop]

IDK, though. A good part of its appeal for me is successfully translating Ghibli's cinematic art direction to a video game. I don't know that a DS could really do that justice, but maybe if it does well enough, the DS game will release after all, too. It looks good as far as DS games go.

[enemy anemone]

ugh, that Ghibli game looks too cute and fun. another game I want to play but can't. (the other one is still Kirby.)

I saw that Portal for the Mac and PC is free this weekend, so even though it looks like the sort of thing I am terrible at and will frustrate me to no end, I'm going to give it a whirl. the download is taking a very long time. I don't know why I do these things.

I think the last time I posted what I was playing, it was I Love Katamari. I managed to finish it and get praise from the King at every level, which should have completed my life, but it did not. since then I have been filling my pockets with all manner of cute and colorful frogs. :\

[Vlad!]

BTW, that just happened. Or is about to happen. Whatever.

I of course have the original carts and my SNES. However, plugging an SNES into a 52-inch 16:9 makes even the most beautiful games look like poo nuggets. I will likely continue my time-honored tradition of buying the same game again (we're not going to talk about how many times I've bought Final Fantasy IV) just to play it at high resolution without having to set up the SNES.

[Vlad!]

I still haven't quite come to terms yet with my status of Casual/Occasional Gamer and Suspected Grown-up, so I will occasionally relapse into past behaviors of buying, borrowing, and/or renting games which look cool. Usually these games sit on my end table or bookshelf and taunt me, but sometimes I have a free picosecond and I start actually playing one, just to see what it's like. This almost always lasts for just one sitting, after which I think "eh, it was OK, but I'm not going to play any more of it". But sometimes my response instead is "this is awesome! How many friends do I have to drop in order to finish this game?"

That's sort of what happened with Radiant Historia.

Did you ever read one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid? The book is something like 100 pages long, but you read it 2-3 pages at a time, after which you are offered a choice. Depending on how you choose, you flip to a different page and keep reading there. If you have read one, you probably did it the same way I did: with bookmarks, dog-eared pages, and fingers inserted in different spots so that if your choice didn't turn out how you hoped you could flip back and try again. Radiant Historia is designed around this same premise.

Without giving away too much of the early plot, you play as Stocke, a Special Intelligence operative and exemplar of what I wanted to be when I grew up, who through various hijinks is given the power to travel back through time. Not exactly Doc Brown style, though, as he can only travel to points in his history where he had to make critical decisions. This basically provides the player with the power to flip back through the book and choose a different option when it turns out that deciding to super-size your Big Mac resulted in the destruction of civilization as you know it.

As you can imagine, this has the potential to get complicated really quickly. You actually end up jumping between two parallel timelines, moving back and forth through history (and alternate histories!) in order to achieve your objectives. However, the developers made the bold (and, in my opinion, correct) decision to throw logic and common sense out the window in favor of implementing something the average non-Ph.D-in-quantum-physics player can easily grasp. Your character levels stay the same no matter where or when you go (so if you go back in time and meet up with a party member, her level will be the same as it was in the present time you just left). Your items and equipment remain the same, and you never have to worry about meeting yourself.

One of the cool things that comes out of this is that you can never really miss a sidequest, since you can always just find a spot in time near that sidequest and travel back to it. It also means that you can replay, literally, any part of the game you want to, including boss fights and cutscenes. This turns out to be kind of cool.

It also means that you'll find yourself replaying scenes a lot, but fortunately Radiant Historia has an industrial-strength set of anti-tedium measures, including the ability to fast-forward dialog in addition to just skipping it outright. Not just cutscenes, either, but any action in which you do not have direct control can be skipped over by pressing the Start button. This is most excellent, and I would love to see more games implement it.

One amusing flaw it shares with Final Fantasy VI:
* Herp joins your party
* Herp leaves your party
* Much later in the game, you meet Herp and his friend Derp. They both join your party.
* Derp is at the same level you're at, but Herp is the level he was when he left your party thousands of years ago!

Speaking of FFVI, though, one of the things I immediately noticed about Radiant Historia is that it feels very similar to Square's 16-bit masterpiece. Not necessarily in game mechanics, but the setting itself is uncannily reminiscent of FFVI's swords-and-steampunk milieu, right down to the starting city of Alistel feeling virtually identical to FFVI's starting city of Narshe. Note also that Alistel is where mana is converted into a form which can power technology, known as Thaumatech. Narshe is a city which works on using magic to power technology, known as Magitek. And Stocke is basically Locke, minus the whole obsession over being called a Treasure Hunter.

I'm not saying that Radiant Historia is ripping off FFVI (though it could certainly choose worse games to rip off!), but for the superstar development team who created Radiant Historia to pay homage to one of the finest RPGs of the 16-bit era...well, that's just plain classy.

(Most of the game is not actually that similar to FFVI, and in fact the battle system reminds me much more of FFX, or rather what FFX's system would have been like if it were well-designed instead of just a way of biding your time until you can summon Bahamut).

I'm still less than ten hours in, but call me hooked. Radiant Historia is well-designed, well-implemented, well-written, and an all-around good original game. It's a lot of fun and doesn't take itself too seriously or get in its own way. If it finishes nearly as well as it starts, it will definitely go down as one of the best RPGs for a platform which has had several excellent RPGs.

[whim]

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I don't like having to make any more decisions than I have to, but I never did like those books.   

[Vlad!]

Apparently Namco are publishing Ni no Kuni (the Ghibli game) in the US. Here's a link, which also includes a trailer (trailer is in Japanese, but it looks brilliant).

I will be preordering it immediately when it's available on Amazon.

[bloop]

Picked up Arkham City. So far, basically more of the same, and I'm not complaining about that.

[enemy anemone]

Apparently Namco are publishing Ni no Kuni (the Ghibli game) in the US. Here's a link, which also includes a trailer (trailer is in Japanese, but it looks brilliant).

I will be preordering it immediately when it's available on Amazon.

UGH! so frustrating!  

[Vlad!]

Picked up Arkham City. So far, basically more of the same, and I'm not complaining about that.

The name of that game is annoying.

Arkham city is a fictional city used extensively by H.P. Lovecraft in his novels, and is often mentioned as the location of Miskatonic University. I assume the asylum in Batman canon is named such as a nod to Lovecraft and his tales of eldrich horror. There is no Arkham City in DC Universe canon (unless one got added in their recent reboot), as Arkham Asylum is a part of Gotham city.

[bloop]

Arkham Asylum was the first game, but the new game's name is apt for the story (since Arkham has expanded to enclose parts of the city).

Not sure if it's canon (though I know they set it up in a series of comics), but it's a great game so far.

[bloop]

I'm really confused by these bell-shaped graphs on some of these Portal challenge maps. I see murlough has fewer portals than me, generally, and on the one's I've tried, I can match him, but I don't see a possible way to get less than that.

[Vlad!]

Finished with Radiant Historia. Clocked in at well under 40 hours, which felt like exactly the right length.

Radiant Historia is one of those rare games which just feels comfortable in its own skin. It's original, but not so different that it throws out decades of game development wisdom. It's unapologetically bold in scope, but doesn't aim too high. It's comfortable being whatever length it needs to be, so there's not really any padding. And boy is it good.

There are a few criticisms I do need to address:

First, for a game which centers around traveling between and around alternate timelines, it's surprisingly linear. This isn't a bad thing per se--the plots of some of my favorite games are astoundingly linear--but one of the things I really like about the near-endgame point in an RPG is exploring the world that's been created for the player. I realize that in RH the exploration is more temporal than geographic, but there are some cool locations which you really only get to visit once. While you can go back in time and visit them again if you so choose, you just get the same thing you got the first time. In FFVI, going to Doma Castle in the second half of the game lets you fight Wrexsoul and get a lot of backstory on Cyan. In Radiant Historia, trying to visit the Sand Castle past Chapter 5 or so just gets you a "you don't really want to go that way" message. That's just plain lazy. I realize I can go back in time to Chapter 2 and hang out with my bros in the Sand Castle there, but I already did that.

Second, and this is a really common trend these days, is that some of the side quests are really a guide dang it. I'm not too ashamed to admit that I had to look up the solution to a couple of the sidequests, since I just plain didn't feel like traveling back and forth through all the different chapters and trying to figure out which NPC to talk to in order to make something happen.

The reason this is a minor criticism (and one of the reasons why Radiant Historia is so cool) is that, as I said in my Impression above, you can't really miss a sidequest. If you failed to Talk To Everyone (and you want to talk to everyone), you can always just go back in time and pick it up later. Add this to the fact that once you've gotten a sidequest it appears on your timeline, and this means that you don't really have to remember a whole lot. This is a great feature.

I encourage players to beat the game without using a guide first. When you beat it you get to save a clear file which starts you at the save point right before the final boss. You can then go back in time and use a guide to complete all the sidequests you missed/failed miserably at during your clean run. There's a double-handful of sidequests which add extra scenes to the ending, and if you complete all of them you get the "true" ending. This sort of thing really makes me annoyed in most games, but since RH gives you effectively infinite do-overs with very little frustration involved, I'm willing to give it a pass.

One bit of advice: there are two sidequests which involve beating extremely difficult bosses, which is a bit incongruous given the low difficulty of the rest of the game. Neither of these sidequests are necessary for getting the super happy funtime ending, and ironically the only thing they do is make the rest of the game easier, since one gives you Stocke's best armor, and the other one gives you his best weapon.

The above paragraph actually brings me back to my third and final criticism: the game is really easy, and by the end of it Stocke is for all intents and purposes a god on earth. With his best armor, the last boss was doing triple-digit damage to two of my party members and single- or low-double-digit damage to Stocke. Physical attacks are nearly worthless by the end of the game, though, so ironically even though his attack stats were through the roof it was my casters who did the major damage dealing. But Stocke gets plenty of recovery spells, so he makes a reasonably effective healer/tank combo while the ladies dish out the magical hurtin'.

I could ramble on for several hundred more words, but I think you get the picture. Radiant Historia is an excellent game, reminiscent of the old-school masterpieces. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

[bloop]

I just finished the main campaign of Batman: Arkham City. The game is on point, could even be GOTY perhaps (I'm leaning toward Portal 2, though), and I'm enjoying the New Game + feature now.

[Vlad!]

Played about 30 minutes of Phantasy Star Zero over the last couple of days.

Phantasy Star is, like Megami Tensei, one of those old-school series that never really rose up to the same glory as some of its contemporaries, though in this case its lack of popularity may be due to its parentage, since it's a Sega series. The original Phantasy Star came out for the Sega Master System in the late 80s, and while I don't recall it bringing anything remarkable or new to the table, it was a solid example of the nascent RPG industry's state of the art.

These days, Phantasy Star means third-person action RPG rather than first-person dungeon crawler, mostly due to the series' transition from traditional RPG to adventure RPG in the MMORPG style. In fact, most of the recent iterations of the series have been multiplayer-focused; while Phantasy Star Zero has a single-player story, its predecessor, Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube, was entirely multiplayer-based. Even PS0 offers local multiplayer and wifi options for those who want to go out and slaughter woodland creatures with friends.

It's not my kind of game, and while it has all the hooks which make MMOs feel so compelling at first blush, it has most of the drawbacks as well. Ultimately, it feels like work and tedium, motivated by a thinly-veiled carrot dangling out of reach and the occasional minor reward given to prompt that squirt of dopamine that makes the game, which is ultimately empty and repetitive, feel like the best thing ever. The fact that I don't have to pay a monthly fee to play it is eclipsed by the fact that I don't really even want to play it at all.

[bloop]

I don't know if you've ever played much of the main series, but PSIV was really great.

[Vlad!]

I've never played through a Phantasy Star game, mainline series or MMORPG-style. I have played a little bit of some of them, but not IV.

(My former roommate was a big Phantasy Star enthusiast. I played a bit of PSO with him on his Gamecube, where I was a girl robot named GIRL ROBOT (technically my class was RAcaseal). I think I blocked out most of the experience, because my clearest memory of the whole thing was this conversation:
Me: Why does a robot have breasts? Or gender?
Him: Remember the target demographic.
Me: Oh, right.)

EDIT: Origin of GIRL ROBOT

[Vlad!]

Behold!

The 3d cel-shading in Ni no Kuni looks, frankly, amazing. Why is it that with eight million jiggahertz of processing power, the games which look the best (Valkyria Chronicles, Ni no Kuni) are cel-shaded?

I'm definitely going to have to make time for this one.

[enemy anemone]

ooh, pretty! I especially like the nose-lantern creature nosing around while the dad (?) gives the girl sad (?) news.

[Vlad!]

Based on my rudimentary understanding of the language, the boy (Oliver) is trying to get the girl (Shelly) to go outside with him. She says that her father will be angry. Her father comes in and says that he is concerned about her sickness but he will let her go outside if that's what she really wants. There are undoubtedly some details I missed.

[enemy anemone]

oh, interesting! my brain had imagined a more elaborate and melodramatic explanation (which didn't actually make sense) for what was going on. the girl was under a spell and couldn't leave the room or was a vampire and would be hurt by the sun, the mother might be dying or had already died (the sad news), and the boy had to find a way to break the spell/unvampire the girl and save the mother or something.

[Vlad!]

Speaking of trailers and melodrama, the Gyakuten Saiban movie trailer!

Objection!

[Vlad!]

Apparently Disgaea 4 came out at some point.

The original Disgaea is one of my favorite games of all time. I was satisfied but unimpressed with Disgaea 2 and was only moderately more impressed by the third one.

So anyway, I bought Disgaea 4. Note that it took over a year after buying Disgaea 3 before I played it, and D2 had been out for eons before I even bought it, so the fact that I now own the disc doesn't mean a whole lot.

(I think part of my frustration with the series comes from my tiny attention span and increasing boredom with sameness. This is why I only tend to like one installment of each Mega Man iteration and why it took me years to play through the Phoenix Wright games: been there, done that is not what I look for in my entertainment).

[enemy anemone]

I paid some pennies for Windosill. cute and fun, albeit over rather quickly.

[bloop]

Playing Super Mario 3D Land and the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on the 3DS.

[Vlad!]

I only played one 2011 game this year: Radiant Historia (impression review), so it by default gets my Game of the Year trophy. It's too bad, because I think that game would deserve the trophy even in competition with other contenders.

I also played through Persona 4 and Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3, both of which I really enjoyed.

I played a handful of other games for the DS, but didn't write about most of them and didn't finish any of them. I did play Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, which was a worthy successor to the franchise and different enough to be interesting, but I never wound up finishing it.

I am (tentatively) excited about the following:
* Ni no Kuni
* Devil Survivor 2
* Deus Ex: Human Revolution
* Disgaea 4

I actually already own Disgaea 4, but I haven't even removed the shrinkwrap yet. I'll be lucky if I finish two of those games this year. We'll see how it goes.

[bloop]

Still playing through the aforementioned games, + Zelda: Skyward Sword. Also, Rayman Origins with my son.

[Vlad!]

Looks like the highly-anticipated Ni no Kuni has been delayed until late this year (I'm assuming by "winter 2012" they don't actually mean "now", though that would be an accurate interpretation).

[Ian]

Finally bought Skyward Sword.  Played an hour and then went and replayed Portal instead 

it truly pains me to say it, but after 25 years Zelda may finally be wearing then

[Vlad!]

I haven't completed a Zelda game since Link to the Past...

Loved the original, played it, never beat it (but I did watch my brother when he beat it). Loved the second one (The Adventures of Link), did beat it. Loved the third one (Link to the Past), beat it multiple times and probably put well over 100 hours on it over the years. Liked the fourth one (Link's Awakening), but only beat it using the screen warp cheat, so I don't really count that. Played Ocarina of Time, enjoyed it OK, but never beat it. Never even played any of the others until Phantom Hourglass, which I didn't get into at all.

(As I was typing this it felt familiar, and apparently I've told this story before. One of the hallmarks of getting old, I suppose.)

I've never been much of a third-person action/adventure aficionado, so I guess that's not much of a surprise. I can't really explain why I absolutely loved Link to the Past, though. But until I got the RPG bug it was hands-down my favorite SNES game.