A Return to Bloggin' - SRWJ

Well, hello again! It's been a while, so lemme tell you what I've been up to over the past six months or so, vidja-game wise.

Mostly, I've been working on editing (read: rewriting) the script for an English-language romhack of Super Robot Wars Judgment for the Game Boy Advance, a ridiculously awesome game about robots punching other robots in half, as demonstrated by the following screenshot:
Super Robot Wars is a really, really long-running franchise of strategical role-playin'-game-a-ma-phones that smush the characters and plotlines of a whole bunch of different robot anime together. This means hundreds of characters, most of the plotlines from their respective shows, and a lot of dialogue.

In the case of this romhack, said dialogue was translated by a non-native English speaker, and needed a lot of rewriting. I saw the project page for the game over at romhacking.net back in January, shot the project lead a PM asking if he needed any editing help, and got sent the dialogue for the game's first scenario. I spent a couple of hours polishing the thing up, sent it back to the project lead, and got a whole bunch of new scenario scripts in return. And so it went for about 5 months. Working on this thing was, I found, a lot of fun. I ended up skipping on Persona 4 in favor of rewriting goofy Super Robot Wars dialogue. Plus, y'know, last semester in college. Priorities (sorta).

For the record, I'm not a member of any kind of fan community devoted to these games, and I'd never even seen half of the shows featured in the game prior to starting work on the project. The franchise in its modern form is consistently breezy, silly fun that generally treats the player's time with respect, and I really dug working on it. When the translation patch gets released in a few months, I suspect you'll dig it too.

Still, I'm not quite done yet. The massive script has been edited, sure, but I still need to go back and see everything in context, proofread, find stuff I missed, and rewrite some more. I was originally thinking about turning this into a kind of "Let's Play" thing, akin to David Cabrera's old blog playthrough of the Super Robot Wars 2 remake from a few years ago, but decided against it at the last second. People are waiting for this dang translation patch, y'know? If I started talking about this game you can't play every day for a month or two, I would eventually start feeling like a pretty legit asshole, as opposed to a guy who was merely accused of being one by crazy robot fans.

So instead, I'm changing this thing from a vidja-game blog to an all-purpose one. I've been meaning to do it for a while, but this time it's fo' real. Consider this fair warning.

Capsule Review - Lost Odyssey

First Blue Dragon, now Lost Odyssey, the other big-name Xbox 360 project from Mistwalker, a studio that seems incapable of making a good game.

Lost Odyssey's premise seems tailored specifically to make hack japanese role-playing game designers weep. The protagonist, a man named Kaim Argonar, is immortal. The game, however, is a remarkably traditional JRPG. How did the designers reconcile this? Well, if an immortal character falls in battle, they get back up a couple turns later with a percentage of their HP. If everyone gets KO'd, then it's game over as usual.

At the beginning of the game, we see Kaim get crushed beneath a meteor. Everyone in a hundred mile radius appears to be dead, buried beneath molten magma. Kaim's A-OK. Later, in another battle, he and another immortal character get hit by a gust of wind generated by the wings of some kind of large bird. They both take mortal damage and die. "GAME OVER" appears on the screen. There is a problem here!

Pacing problems abound. Here's a summary of the Things You Do in the first disc (10 hours) of the game, in order:

1. Nearly impossible-to-lose series of introductory battles. Both paralyizingly boring and pretty cool looking.
2. Long stroll through capital city. Jab the A button repeatedly while walking along every single wall in order to find Important Hidden Items (actually not important at all). Compared to the city folk with nothing interesting to say and the backtracking between areas, pressing the A button repeatedly is actually the most interesting part.
   
3. Finally leave the city for obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest.
4. Hardest first boss in a modern JRPG ever.
5. Slightly shorter version of 2.
6. Slightly shorter version of 3 and 4.
7. Segment where you're trapped in prison and must walk around in circles until the game decides it is time for you to leave.
8. Awful stealth section.
9. Even longer version of 2.
10. Ominous foreshadowing.
11. Funeral minigame! First run around through a massive area and pick up 10 flowers by pressing the A button. Then do it again as another character, this time picking up twigs. Then a torch-waving minigame. Start crying.
    
12. Obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest, followed by a dungeon that looks like a dungeon.
13. Save your game before inserting Disc 2.
    

On the upside, the English voice acting is pretty good!

Capsule Review - Blue Dragon (XBOX 360)

Playing lots of games that aren't obscure Japanese playstation games means... quick little capsule reviews! Although yeah, I've been playing some genuinely terrible obscure Japanese Playstation games, too. Don't play Touki Denshou Angel Eyes. It's not worth it.

An attempt to recapture the collaborative magic that resulted in Chrono Trigger, Blue Dragon is a charmless mishmash of Stuff We've Seen Before stapled to a plot that goes nowhere interesting. Akira Toriyama's character designs are his most boring ever. It's easy enough to assume that he was fed up with being associated with fictional works containing the word "Dragon" in their titles, and provided the willfully schlocky and unimaginative character designs in this game as a form of protest. The big bad guy, a geriatric named Nene (see below image) who flies around the world in his futuristic airship tormenting people (because he's just that kind of guy), is the most obvious offender. He has absurd horn-rimmed glasses, and floats around in a flying chair while wearing what appears to be a cozy blanket around his waist. It doesn't help that none of the protagonists appear to be over the age of 15. Or that I can't remember their names despite playing the game for many hours before calling it quits.Blue Dragon, being the brainchild of Final Fantasy Man Hironobu Sakaguchi, cribs Final Fantasy V's compelling job system and Final Fantasy X's compelling battle system, and removes everything that made either of them good. Characters switch between various incredibly boring classes (Black Mage! Barrier Mage! Generalist!), with no visual change other than an icon at the bottom of the screen. Instead of unlocking progressively weirder and tenuously useful job classes as you progress, Blue Dragon opts to let you slowly unlock classes from a small, unchanging list as your characters level up. The game's Xbox 360 achievements, of course, involve reaching level 99 with all of your characters, and then doing it for all of your characters' job classes. The easiest way to do this is to level a barrier mage until he learns a spell that lets you run into enemies in order to automatically defeat them for job points, and then run around, smashing into said enemies over and over for hours, occasionally visiting an Inn to replenish your mp. There are people out there who genuinely enjoy this.

The soundtrack, composed by Final Fantasy's Nobuo Uematsu, is nearly totally forgettable. Except for the boss music, which works a lot better when it's ironic. What the hell happened with this game?

YOU WA SHOCK - The World Ends With You is good?!

At a glance, The World Ends With You looks like another one of those inane Square-Enix games with angry Tetsuya Nomura teenagers running around doing generic JRPG jibba-jabba. Actually playing it, though? That's when you realize that it's probably one of the best, most focused games they've ever made. It's also one of the best games available for the DS.

Unfortunately, a few people I know have been turned off by the game's aesthetics and storyline within the first 20 minutes, which is a bummer. Yes, the protagonist, Neku Sakuraba, is initially an angst-ridden amnesiac with character design by Tetsuya Nomura. He wakes up in Shibuya and finds that he's trapped, forced to compete in a bizarre Battle Royale for seven days, or die. The story works, surprisingly, because it's incredibly fast-paced, and Neku develops into a fairly likeable character within a couple of hours.

I'm going to resist talking about the story, though, because The World Ends With You is a landmark of RPG game design that will probably end up being ignored completely. It's absurd how many stupid, endemic RPG design problems this game fixes in one fell swoop, especially considering that the game's directors were all graphic designers from Kingdom Hearts II.

There are so many good ideas here. Combat is entirely voluntary in nearly all situations, which is an incredibly good decision considering the open-world feel of the game. The way it works is - there's an icon in the bottom right corner of the screen when you're running around Shibuya. Tap it, and you'll "scan" the area, allowing you to read the thoughts of the omnipresent passers-by, and see "noise," which are angry-looking grafitti symbols that represent groups of enemies.

The thoughts of others are represented by blue thought bubbles, which you can tap to get the equivalent of a generic villager's conversation in any other RPG. You don't get to be privy to the secret hatreds and fetishes of an entire city, unfortunately (or fortunately? man, whatever) but the developers still had some fun with the concept. The oddest thought that I've run into was one written entirely in Japanese, which serves as one of many examples of the localization team's gold-plated balls.

Similarly, tapping on any of the noise symbols floating around a general area will start battlin'. You have a roughly two second period to tap up to four noise symbols, which will create a multiple-battle chain. The more enemies you chain together, the higher the difficulty, experience and drop rate of each progressive battle will be. There's even an item you can buy in the post-game that lets you chain up to sixteen battles together, at which point the risk-reward ratio becomes positively insane.

There's more! At any time, you can go to the items/equipment/save menu and drag a little slider around to adjust your level. Even if you've accumulated 60 levels' worth of experience, you can drop yourself tp levels 1-59 just by dragging the slider around. What's the point of crippling yourself like that? Well, the lower your level, the higher the enemy drop rate becomes. The best way to get really insane loot drops is to play skillfully at a really low level, where death is but a moment away.

Orrrr you can fudge the numbers a little bit. The only thing level determines is your HP. You can improve all of your base stats permanently by ingesting any of a huge number of food items from shops scattered throughout Shibuya. And man, this part is fucking great, too! The way this works is, both Neku and his partners can eat 24 "bytes" of food per day in real time, which represent the process of digestion. Every battle you fight digests one byte of food. A soda only takes 2 bytes to run through your system, and will only slightly cure your hunger pangs (affinity with your partner, basically), while a bowl of the ultra-rare Shadow Steak Ramen will take a full 24 bytes to digest, and permanently raise your base drop rate a little bit once finished. There are also a plethora of drugs, herbal supplements, donuts, soups and salads, mexican hot dogs etc. which all have various effects on your system and a charming description to round everything out.

Right, so: how does combat work? It's nuts, is what it is, taking place on both screens of the DS simultaneously. Neku appears on the bottom screen, his partner (dictated by the story) appears on the top, the same enemy group appears on both screens, and you get to fight them simultaneously on both screens while they do the same to you.

You control your partner with the d-pad. Tapping left and right starts a combo attack against an enemy in the specified direction, pressing up jumps, and down either blocks or sidesteps enemy attack. Neku, in the meantime, uses a variety of stylus-based inputs to attack enemies. These come in the form of equippable "pins," of which there are several hundred, each granting a different attack (all pins can be levelled up and "mastered," as well, and some even evolve into new pins, so there's that, too). Some cause Neku to slash an enemy when you swipe an enemy with the stylus, some let you drop boulders or fire lightning bolts by tapping enemies, and there are even a few that let you blow or yell into the microphone to attack the entire area with a huge shockwave. The game's official page actually has a bunch of excellent videos showing the battle system in ation, and I emphatically advise you to check it out if this sounds interesting. Or confusing.

The whole thing verges very close to total chaos in terms of how much visual stimulus the game expects you to pay attention to (it's been pointed out by others that combat mirrors the info overload present in a dense urban center like Shibuya), but more smart design choices alleviate most of the initial frustration. You can set your partner to act automatically either after a set period of inactivity, or all the time. You can adjust the game's difficulty, too, and even retry a battle on the easiest difficulty setting after getting a game over if you'd like. It'll even return to the difficulty you were at originally once you finish the battle. How incredibly courteous!

The game is rife with little courtesies. Every time you turn the game on, your equipped pins gain experience equal to the amount of time elapsed since the last time you played. Turn the game off for a couple days, and you'll come back to find all of your pins either levelled up or mastered. The bestiary allows you to easily see the effects of reducing your level on item drop percentages, by toggling back and forth between "adjusted" and "default." There's a crazy mini-game called "Tin Pin Slammer" that lets you use all of the pins you've found to play what can only be described as a cross between pogs, Street Fighter II and Motos. You can play it with up to four players via wi-fi, even!

If you've tried The World Ends With You out and found yourself put off by the initially groan-inducing jRPG goofiness, you oughts to give it another shot. If you've never heard of this shit before, go check it out. It's the best game Square's made in nearly a decade.

Crisis Core - Dreck and Schlock are best buds until...

I recently finished FFVII Crisis Core, Square Enix's latest (and hopefully last) attempt to squeeze money out of thirteen-year old kids who still think Final Fantasy VII is the coolest game ever. That's kind of mean, because I remember thinking that Final Fantasy VII was the coolest game ever too, back when it came out. I still kind of do! It's got a lot of guts, that game.

Crisis Core, though. Man. In FFVII, there's a fairly infamous hour-long cutscene near the beginning of the game. In it, the protagonist, Professor emeritus Cloud Strife of MIT, tells his fellow party members about what happened four fateful years ago in his hometown of Nibelheim...

Cloud's hero, Sephiroth, went crazy, burned Nibelheim to the ground and killed everybody. Later in the game, it turns out that Cloud is actually pretty nuts, too, and that he was comatose for most of the incident. The guy he really looked up to, a man named Zack, went and fought Sephiroth. Of course, this is all presented in extremely confusing flashbacks in FFVII.

The game's battle system: "DING DING DING THREE SEPHIROTHS"

Crisis Core, then, is Square's attempt to fill in the blanks. It's a high-budget PSP game that tells Zack's story up until his inevitable death, and it makes an already confusing story that I thought I already kinda knew into a borderline incomprehensible new one! I guess I have scenario writer Kazushige Nojima to thank for that.

Nojima was also the douchebag responsible for the story mode in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and that sure was stupid. Playing Crisis Core, I think I've figured out what makes his work so consistently awful: in all the games for which he's been responsible for the story, I always feel like there's some other game I was supposed to have played which filled in the backstory. In FFVII, that was part of the charm.

The problem with Crisis Core's narrative is that, as the game I was supposed to have played before playing FFVII, it doesn't make much sense on its own. Hell, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Crisis Core has one of the dumbest video game stories I've seen in a long time. It's not just dumb because the plot events are contrived, ridiculous and poorly explained - the game itself often sullies or outright breaks the narrative.

There are numerous moments when the game presents you with a pressing situation, and immediately cheapens it with a "mini-game moment." Missiles are heading straight towards the hometown of Zack's mentor, Angeal! The one person left in town is Angeal's elderly mother! Quick, Zack, you gotta do something!

"Like play this stupid minigame!" the game says. "Press the X button with the right timing to cut the missiles out of the sky! If you miss, it's not a big deal, but shouldn't a member of SOLDIER be able to handle this kind of thing?" I'm paraphrasing here, but just barely. Each time you press the X button at the right time, Zack performs a stilted canned attack animation as pixelated explosions erupt around him. It's supposed to look like he's destroying the missiles with his sword, but it looks a little too cheap and clumsy for that. The game keeps track of your "combo," too, and tells you that you're "awesome!!", "superb!!" and "amazing!!"

After you press the X button twelve times, the game gives you an item you don't need based on how many missiles you intercepted successfully. I imagine that there are guys out there who replayed this segment over and over again, making sure to intercept all the missiles in order to get the best item and satisfy their complex OCD.

Immediately after this missile-downing segment comes a cutscene: "Angeal's mother is still in the village! Hurry and save her!"

"But be sure to run around and pick up all the items in the area before time runs out!" the game interrupts, stupidly. You then run around the deserted village square, hastily picking up items before the time limit runs out. Eventually, if you let the time limit run out, even though there's supposed to be an airstrike on the way, the game reveals that it doesn't matter. The items just disappear. It's like nothing even happened.

Every time the story tries to convince you of its gravitas, the game lurches in from offscreen, drunk as hell, and shoots both itself and the story in the foot while juggling colorful and distracting balls, dropping most of them on the floor. Not that it matters, really. If the game is drunk, then the story is retarded.

"I don't make allowances for old men!"

There is a moment near the end of the story when Zack and Cloud are escaping from Nibelheim on motorbike. The game's villain, Genesis, appears suddenly. His motivation for most of the game has been that... whoops! I actually have no idea! He's never given tangible motivation, outside of "revenge" and "Gackt really wanted to voice a character in the game." He spends a lot of time reading lines from his favorite play, LOVELESS, and asking Zack if he understands what he's talking about ("No."). He's also "degrading," because like Sephiroth, he's a mutant supersoldier, too!

Genesis tells Zack, after stopping his bike on a bridge in the middle of nowhere, that Zack's greasy black hair is the secret to preventing him from "degrading," and he proves this by having one of his clone cronies eat his hair. Genesis then flies off as the clone shrieks, is enveloped in a multicolored geyser of light, and transforms into a giant Tetsuya Nomura zipper-beast. This plot development is never mentioned again. As far as I can tell, it's only there to make sure that a boss can appear at that very moment.

One last thing: the game has an optional mission (one of several hundred, all nearly identical) where you fight god, who has 10 million hit points. The only way to win is by maxing Zack's stats out to 255, getting 99,999 HP etc. The ending of the game, even if Zack is totally iller than god, is that Zack gets killed by helicopters and the same stock soldiers that have proven no threat to him for the entire game, in a sequence that Gamespot's Kevin VanOrd says "brilliantly mingles gameplay with narrative in one of the most incredible and moving moments in role-playing history."

Man, I bet.

Phantasy Star Complete Collection OR: M2 does a wonderful job

Phantasy Star Complete Collection is the latest (unfortunately Japan-only) entry in the Sega Ages 2500 Series, which started out as a bunch of low-budget remakes of Sega's classic game franchises, but has since evolved into some of the most lovingly assembled collections of old games currently available for any platform. PS Complete Collection assembles the 4 games (including the English-language versions) from Sega's groundbreaking console role-playing series, and makes most of them a lot more playable with a few new features specific to this collection.

The last time the series was compiled in the United States was in 2002, with a fairly terrible compilation for the Gameboy Advance, and in 2006 on the slightly better Sega Genesis Collection, both courtesy of the lazy guys at Digital Eclipse. This series deserves better!

Phantasy Star (seen at right) was the first console role-playing game ever released in the United States (arriving in 1988, a year before Dragon Warrior) but it remains relatively unheralded because of its appearance on the unpopular Sega Master System. It borrowed liberally from other games of the time period, taking first-person dungeon crawling from Wizardry and its ilk, and creating a fairly original setting by borrowing from fantasy and sci-fi pop-culture whenever possible. Besides that, it's one of the first games with a strong female protagonist, in addition to being a technical marvel for its time period - Final Fantasy was released two days before Phantasy Star in Japan, and it looks genuinely embarrassing by comparison.

Phantasy Star II, which appeared about two years later on the Megadrive/Genesis, is also widely regarded as a classic. It had a large cast of characters, an epic storyline spanning multiple planets, and a fairly modern-lookin' battle system. I also have a really, really hard time playing it, these days!

Like many really old RPGs, most of your time spent in PSI & II consists of walking around in circles just outside of towns, fighting monsters over and over again until you accumulate enough money and experience to move on to the next segment of the game, which usually involves looking for an item, person or dungeon in the middle of nowhere. It's really hard for me to enjoy these games, because making numbers go up as slowly and tediously as possible is... not fun! At all!

Thankfully, M2, the compilation's developers and all-around great guys, saw fit to add several new features to make playing the earlier games less tedious and horrible. Besides including the English-language versions of all the games on the disc, you can play both games with sped-up combat and walking speeds, and every game on the compilation lets you adjust the difficulty a little bit - "Normal" is the default setting, identical to the original game, while "Easy" and "Very Easy" increase the amount of experience and money that monsters drop when defeated, effectively tripling the speed of each game. Here's a video I uploaded demonstrating some of these new features:



Thanks to these additions, it's a lot easier to go back and appreciate the good things about these games, as opposed to just wallowing in tedium. That's important, because there's a lot of good here. Eric-jon Rössel Waugh's review of the first three games in the series from back in 2002 makes this clear:

"Phantasy Star II is the first truly great videogame epic, and one of the few tragedies attempted within the medium. It is the ultimate coming-of-age game. It is the Lord of the Rings of videogaming (especially when compared to The Hobbit of Phantasy Star 1). To be sure, at times it can be just as inaccessible as Tolkien's rambling saga. And yet, for those with persistence, it offers a chillingly poignant experience that can haunt you for the rest of your life."

I don't quite agree, but goddamn. Clearly, this is an emotionally powerful series of games - even if I've never quite felt the same way about them, I can't just dismiss them as technically interesting exercises in level-grinding.

Anyway, beyond the first two games, the compilation also includes Phantasy Star III, which was developed by a completely different team than the other games, rushed to market and is kind of hilariously bad at times. Phantasy Star IV ties up the story from the I & II in a really satisfying way, and doesn't require hours of grinding out levels. It's a really good game!

Sega also developed a series of text adventure games that helped flesh out the back story for the characters in PSII, and they're on the disc, too! Unfortunately, they were only available on some kind of satellite game service that Sega or somebody offered, and as such they were never officially translated into English. The absurdly professional MIJET romhacking group went ahead and translated three of the games into English unofficially, though, so if you want to check a few of them out, there you go!

So yeah, hey. This is a really nice package for $30, even if you gotta go through play-asia and whatnot. Maybe Sega will decide to localize some of the more recent Sega Ages entries for the western market? I'm not banking on it!

(as a side note, many of the early budget remakes in the Sega Ages 2500 Series were thrown on a disc and released in the United States as Sega Classics Collection so there's still hope, sorta. Also, Kurt Kalata has written a pretty decent page covering every entry in the series, which you can read here)

UPDATE: Since I put this post up, the game's official site has been updated with information on how to unlock Phantasy Star Gaiden and Phantasy Star Adventure, two Japan-only spin-off games for the Game Gear. The prior is a console RPG like the other games, but on a slightly smaller scale, and the latter is a text adventure game. Both have been translated into English, unofficially.

Anyway, the method for unlocking both of the games in Complete Collection is pretty simple: just hold down right on the d-pad at the title screen and press start. Both games have an extensive gallery collection like every other game on the disc, as well. What'd I say about M2 being great?

Getting the b-ball rolling.

Last Tuesday saw the release of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, an absurd, mock-heroic send-up of Japanese role-playing games starring former NBA superstar Charles Barkley in the role of postcyberpocalyptic world savior. It was developed by four members of the Gaming World Forums going by the collective name "Tales of Game's Studios," (incorrect punctuation intended) and if it isn't clear yet, you should not be taking this game seriously.

The first, unfinished version of Gaiden was released nearly a year ago, and was developed with RPGMaker, the favorite game development tool for high-school kids with too much time on their hands. At the time, I thought it would never be completed - part of the joke was how often these games spiraled out of control as their creators piled more and more ideas and ambition into a project they would never finish. Also, RPGMaker kind of sucks, and no matter how much work you put into subverting its limitations, you're probably going to end up with a game that's still a chore to play. This was the case with the first demo, which wasn't really fun to play, despite having such a fantastic premise. I forgot about the game, figuring it was nothing more than an elaborate joke, but every once in a while I would think back and ask "what if?"

When I saw that the game had been finished, I nearly spewed a mouthful of Mrs. T's Pierogies all over the computer screen. Not only was the game finished, but it had been rebuilt from the ground up using Game Maker - rebuilt from the ground up to not suck. The battle system is now a fun little riff on Paper Mario's schtick, and the dialogue, which was easily the best thing about the demo, maintains its tone of hilarious bathos through the full game.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is one of the most entertaining games I've played in a long time, independently developed or not. It's also free and readily available to download from the Tales of Game's Studios homepage. It requires Windows, but I imagine most computers made in the past ten years should be able to run it just fine.