General RPGs' Minigames 8: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass's Fishing

Hey, guys. Yeah, I know I did a rant about fishing minigames already. Sorry. In my defense, I didn't anticipate touching the subject again. I thought that one would pretty much cover the entirety of the loathsome fishing minigame experience. I mean, I did mention pretty much every terrible idea for fishing minigames in there that I could think of and had encountered. I figured it'd cover everything.

But, my friends, Nintendo is the most creative game company on Earth. And while this is usually a good thing...it also means they can find new forms of torment that none of us could have prepared for.

So here's the deal. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has a fishing minigame. And in many ways it is just as horrible as any other modern day fishing minigame that my rant outlines. I mean, jeez, the process for reeling the damn catch in is just ridiculous. TLoZPH goes out of its way to use the DS Stylus as creatively as possible, and unfortunately, sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth. Fishing is one of those times, because as annoying as standard fishing minigames' complicated mechanisms are with a controller, they're apparently much worse when you're trying to use a stylus.

There's also the problem of finding the fish worth catching. In order to reap the benefits of doing this stupid minigame at all,* you eventually need to get rare fish, or else you're wasting your time. Unfortunately, this is one of those many minigames where acquiring the rarest target is basically left to the mercy of the game's random number generator to decide when, where, and if it's going to show up.

But you know, this is nothing the other rant wouldn't more or less have covered. I mean, it's annoying as hell, but not unexpected. So what makes TLoZPH worse than usual? Getting to the goddamn fish.

See, in most games, spots to fish at are more or less permanent. You see a little patch of lake/ocean/river/pond/swamp/stream/coast/fjord/well/sewer/spilled soft drink that has a fish swimming around in it or jumping up in the air above it, and you know you can fish there. You can fish there as soon as you see it, you can fish there the next time you come by, you can fish there 30 hours later into the game. Sometimes a location becomes inaccessible because of plot reasons (if your protagonist gets stranded in a different dimension, chances are that you've lost your chance to haul a trout out of Peaceful Swimmers' Lake Beach Resort), but in general, once a fishing location, always a fishing location.

This is not the case in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Each time you get onto the world map, the fish have moved to a different place, and if you're interested in wrangling an angler, you'll have to figure out where the damn fish have gotten to and haul your ass over there. This is an inconvenient enough process under normal circumstances, but keep in mind that this is TLoZ: Phantom Hourglass. Which means that going anywhere on the world map involves that intolerable boogeyman of game play infamous to Suikoden 4 and TLoZ: The Wind Waker, Sailing. As in those titles, the further you progress through Phantom Hourglass, the more time you devote to strategies to lessen the duration of your Sailing as much as possible, so this minigame's requirement for more of it is really annoying.

But it's not the worst part.

The worst part is not that you have to go to new locations all the time via the indescribably boring process of Sailing. No. The worst part is not that the fish move...it's that they move constantly. Like, they don't just switch their locations every time you return to the world map. The fish continue to move while you travel to them. Meaning that by the time you get to where they WERE, it's no longer where they ARE. In addition to the frustrating fishing controls, in addition to the irritation of tracking down the right fish for your reward, in addition to the aggravation of having to add more Sailing to the game just to get at the fish each time you want to play the damn minigame...in addition to all that, you have to CHASE these things down!

Who the fuck is the sadistic MADMAN at Nintendo who came up with this?














* Benefits which, by the way, are not NEARLY worth the trouble--when it comes to Zelda games, I've been a Find Every Heart Container Completionist for almost 20 years, and even I said "Fuck this shit," and gave up on the Heart Container you can get through this minigame.

General RPG Maker SquareEnix: Why I'm Boycotting its Products

Squaresoft gave us a good run. It wasn't always perfect, not by a long shot--Final Fantasy 5 and Xenogears can certainly evidence that--but there was a stretch of time during the days of the Super Nintendo where Squaresoft was almost unquestionably the best RPG company out there, and it had some good offerings for the Playstation 1 era, and even a few early on for the Playstation 2 time of gaming. I daresay most RPG players grew up on Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and other Squaresoft classics. And if you look into emulation, you can discover that there were a lot of really neat, creative titles that Square made during its golden years that never reached these shores, but have been translated by fans, games like Bahamut Lagoon and Live A Live. Squaresoft more often than not made its focus quality, and it worked. But all that has changed.

Enix, of course, always sucked.*

I don't know how much of the fall of Squaresoft can be blamed on their merger with Enix. A lot of people think that was the one and only factor in it. I'm not entirely sure about that, though. From what I understood, the 2 companies were supposedly not going to meddle too strongly in one another's affairs. And Final Fantasy 8, made way before the merger, certainly showed that Squaresoft was not above shameless pandering taking the place of competent craftsmanship. And then Final Fantasy 10-2, also made right before the merger, showed us that not only was Square not above the video game equivalent of prostitution, they were fully willing to revel in it. Giving shallow, stupid fans pretty things to distract them was apparently worth any level of lazy developing, horrible writing, and destruction of their own characters, as long as it made money. So it's not like Squaresoft didn't have it in them to be terrible.

But whether or not the merger can be blamed in entirety, or even at all, for the progression of the company past April of 2003, the fact is that SquareEnix has been worsening with increasing speed since then as a company.

It's not that it hasn't had good titles since then--I quite liked Kingdom Hearts 2 and Chain of Memories, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume was really quite good, and FF Crystal Chronicles 1 wasn't bad. And hey, they actually IMPROVED a few of the series that Enix had--Star Ocean 3 was a decent RPG, as was Dragon Quest 8, which is an amazing achievement for a game in either series. But the quality of the products they make has just generally been decreasing. Final Fantasy 12, for example, was amazing only in that it could manage to have such a confused mess of a plot yet still be very boring and utterly meaningless.

That's not really the reason I'm so furious with the company, though. I don't hold a grudge against a company for substandard games alone; hell, if I did, I would probably be too actively hunting down Media.Vision employees with a shotgun for 80% of the Wild Arms series to write this rant. But it's the WAYS that so many of SquareEnix's new products are bad that gets me irate. I'll forgive incompetence a dozen times before I forgive greed, exploitation, sloth, and apathy.

The first problem is that they are actively destroying their own creations. I mean, look at Valkyrie Profile 2. VP1 is by all accounts a legend of Role Playing Games, up there with Planescape: Torment and Suikoden 2 for how rare and famous it is amongst hardcore RPG enthusiasts. So what do they do for VP2? Not only do they change the focus of the game entirely from the gods to the far less interesting and worthwhile mortals of its Norse Mythology-based world, and make it into a far less interesting tale of world-saving than of (literal and figurative) soul-saving, but they actually remake the time line of the series in the end of VP2 and make it so that VP1 never happened. One of the most famous and well-loved works that the company owns, and one of the only good things to ever come out of Enix, and what does SquareEnix do with it? It pours a gallon of white-out on its ass and presses ham against this treasure. SquareEnix doesn't understand what made VP1 great, and in its fumbling stupidity as it tries to cash in on that greatness, it retroactively destroys it.

As much as I hate having a company take the blunt Cudgel of Incompetence to a previous creation of worth just to make a quick buck, I just as strongly loathe the pandering. As great as Final Fantasy 7 was, and as much good as it may have done for the RPG market overall, there are times when I wish that game had never existed, because in it, Squaresoft discovered 2 things: Sephiroth and The Turks. Sephiroth is a shallow character and a miserable failure as a worthwhile villain, but that doesn't matter, because he's pretty, brooding, showy, teen-heartthrobby, and have-stupidly-long-swordy enough that every fanboy and fangirl on the planet moistens their clothing in several locations at the mere mention of his name. And it doesn't matter how incompetent, lame, cowardly, stupid, and largely superfluous The Turks were in FF7--they looked cool, acted like they didn't care in that cool way, had cool music, and looked just as pretty and showy and teen-heartthrobby as Sephiroth, only in a way that was mildly masculine. And they have nearly the same following as Sephiroth.

So basically, Squaresoft and by extension SquareEnix learned from FF7 that it doesn't matter how little depth or creative ability there is behind a character or group of characters--if you make him/her appeal both visually, and on the most shallow level possible emotionally, to the unthinking masses who never look beyond surface level, you'll have a VERY profitable product there. And it's really starting to show in their products. I liked Kingdom Hearts 2 very much, but if there's one part of it I hate, it's everything having to do with Organization XIII, the spiritual successors to both Sephiroth and The Turks. Half of them are useless to the plot, none of them have any character depth whatsoever, they take violent control of half of the game despite the Disney villains and even the Heartless being far more interesting...basically, every single thing Organization XIII touches is made worse, cheapened and degraded by being associated with and having to cater to these empty husks. Nomura couldn't have made a more accurate term for them than the one he chose--Nobodies. It still is a good game, but it could have been so much better if less--MUCH less--of its time was devoted to pandering this worthless group of pretty-boys. But of course, character integrity is outweighed by marketability, so the next Kingdom Hearts games are focused on Organization XIII and other similar original characters, with the superior Final Fantasy characters and the FAR superior Disney characters, who were supposed to be the foundation of the series, playing second-fiddle. But hey, money above art, right?

Of course, one sees both pandering AND destruction of previous work in the horde of Final Fantasy 7 spin-offs SquareEnix has been pumping out. If averagely bad titles like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 are turds, then the FF7 franchise is SquareEnix having the squirts. FF7: Advent Children kicked off the irritation with a flashy film that focused on all the male characters that were marketably pretty (Cloud, Sephiroth, Vincent, and the Turks) acting in equally marketable ways (brooding, being sinister and dead, also brooding, and goofing around in that boy-band teen-idol kind of way, respectively), and rather than significantly include the less profitably popular characters who were nonetheless important to the original game's events, SquareEnix brought in 3 MORE pretty boys to serve as the slightly-more-effective-than-Sephiroth-but-still-horribly-lame villains of the movie. Hell, the characters who have been dead for years get more screen time than half of the game's original cast put together. Naturally, this meant that the company was too busy animating bangs, cocky grins, and awkward leather apparel to bother including a plot, or point, to this movie.

"Movie." Right. This product has more in common with pornography than it does with cinema.

In the rare moments that one's brain can function while being force-fed feminine men, ridiculous action scenes involving swords and motorcycles in substitution of an adequately explained and logical story, and Tifa's leather-encased boobs (SquareEnix didn't ENTIRELY forget that there are brainless FF7 fanboys out there who are heterosexual to be pandered to), one might notice that SquareEnix has more or less forgotten who the hell Cloud is. See, Cloud in FF7? He wasn't ALWAYS brooding. He could crack jokes at times, he could keep an upbeat attitude often enough, and he became reasonably friendly with his comrades over the course of the game. Sure, he had plenty of introspection going on in the game, and yeah, a lot of the time he was pretty focused, intense, and unhappy. But that wasn't ALL he ever was, and a fair amount of his character development in the game involves him lightening up a bit and becoming a good leader to his team. In FF7AC, however, Cloud just broods from start to finish. Gone is half his personality, along with the progress he'd made in the game toward accepting Aeris's death and finding reason to keep going with his life. He never cheers up, never really pulls himself together, and he just goes off on his own and ignores anyone else in his life--very different from what the game established him as. Square HAD an eternally brooding asswipe and a perpetually self-doubting dumbass already--their names were Squall Leonhart and Fei Fong Wong. NOT Cloud Strife. They took a genuinely complex and deep character and ruined him.

And Cloud is just the most visible FF7 example; they've really screwed up quite a few things from the original game--Sephiroth's semi-death scene in FF7: Last Order, for example. It puts a very different view on the affair than the game did, with Sephiroth's plunge into the reactor core being of his own doing, rather than Cloud's feat of willpower and strength. In Final Fantasy 7, that scene was, honestly, more ore less amazing to me, seeing Cloud perform a feat of miraculous strength when all hope is lost and defeat Sephiroth by his own evil act. It was seriously awesome. So of course, when they decide to show it again in the anime Last Order, they completely change the purpose of the scene, making Cloud's amazing will and justice a side note to the (ridiculous) idea that Sephiroth is badass and can't be taken down. Then there's the fact that SquareEnix relatively recently stated officially that Sephiroth's got the most powerful will of anyone in the FF7 world...flying completely against what the game originally shows us, which is an obsessive minion of a greater villain (Jenova) who went insane because he read a book that implied that his parentage wasn't perfect. And on and on--the more SquareEnix expands their FF7 setting and characters, the more they destroy their own original canon, canon which was far more satisfying than what they replace it with now.

But getting back to FF7AC, they of course made a lot of money off the whole deal, so more FF7 spin-offs of a similar vein followed, poorly-written games focused on the Turks, Vincent, and Zack. Each one's presentation is cheap and meant to be as appealing on the surface level as possible, while taking no time to provide anything with intellectual substance. And of course, each one's further "exploration" into the setting of FF7 just makes the whole planet and its history more silly and nonsensical.

I hate it when people insult my intelligence by assuming I'll buy whatever looks good rather than whatever actually IS good. And I hate it when people clumsily change something that's already good for the worse for selfish, stupid reasons. So you can see why I haven't been a big fan of SquareEnix for a while.

Compounding my distaste for the way this company conducts itself and creates its products is the issue of Rereleases and Remakes. Now, a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one, but I really do hate these things, at least when SquareEnix is doing them. I admit, if you go far enough into the founding theory of them, I don't necessarily hate the idea...sometimes acquiring an old game is difficult (although getting easier all the time), and a company releasing it a second time on a newer, more accessible system can be a good thing. I mean, I'd certainly never have experienced the excellent Skies of Arcadia or the incomparable Grandia 2 if not for their rereleases.

My problem, however, is that these rereleases are almost always priced the same as a new game. That's not fair to the consumer, and it's dirty business by the company doing the rerelease. The fact of the matter is, even if you do a substantial remake of a game, you are almost always having to do less work on all fronts than you do for making a new game altogether. You take, say, Final Fantasy 6's remake on the Gameboy Advance. The game's plot and characters are already completely set up. The music's already there. The gameplay elements are already programmed. All that SquareEnix had to do was make it work on a DS, touch up the visual aspects and translation, add in a few extra Espers, items, and spells, and put in 2 bonus dungeons. That's it. That, and the cost of actually getting it to stores. Compared to making a new game from scratch, that isn't a lot of time and effort, and thus money, to spend. It's barely ANYTHING. Yet they were selling the damn thing for a price that you'd pay for a regular new game. Hell, it's STILL over $50 if you look for a new copy on Amazon.com.

Know how much a copy of the new remake of Final Fantasy 4 on the DS is? Around 30 bucks. Same with the DS remake of FF1, and the Chrono Trigger DS remake was closer to 40. Now, $30 - $40 is in the range of prices that you pay for a NEW DS game...like, NEW new, developed from scratch, has not been released to the world ever before now. They're charging FULL PRICE for a game that takes HALF the effort to (re)produce. LESS than half! Even if they're redoing the graphics entirely and adding some voices like they did for the recent remake of Final Fantasy 4,** there's still significantly less time and work to put into a remake title. So why isn't the PRICE also significantly less, hm?

Oh, I'll certainly grant you that I like Final Fantasy 4 enough that I'd say it's WORTH spending 35 bucks on, absolutely. But I want to emphasize that this fact is irrelevant. A game's worth is not the determining factor in its price--the cost of developing, producing, packaging, shipping, and marketing it, basically all the stuff actually related to making it, is what should and typically does set a game's price. I didn't pay $500 for a copy of Wild Arms 3, nor did any Gamestop employee or representative of SquareEnix hand me $20 compensation and a formal written apology when I acquired a copy of Grandia 3, so the quality of a game is clearly not meant to be what sets its price.

Regardless of how good or bad the remakes are, the point here is that it's unethical for SquareEnix to charge you the same amount of money for a game they've rereleased with minor changes. They're unfairly inflating the price of a product that they've made much more cheaply than their other similarly-priced products, and hiding behind the fact that most people won't question or mind it because they're used to paying that much for a game. Several consumers know this and don't even care. Well, whether or not anyone minds paying several times more than they should by comparison to similar products and pricing standards, it's still dishonest and immoral, and it pisses me off.

The final huge reason for why I'm swearing off SquareEnix is the Chrono Trigger DS Remake debacle. I did a rant on this a little while ago, and I encourage you to go read that one for the extended explanation, but the short story is, SquareEnix released yet another remake for $40, which is not only the price you could pay for a brand new DS game, but on the HIGH side of standard DS prices. This by itself is exploitative and wrong, as I've mentioned above, but SquareEnix added a special bonus to their consumer-rape this time. Despite the CT remake selling as well in its initial year of release as many, many other RPGs that have been deemed successful (including several made by SquareEnix), the company officially stated that they refused to make a sequel that fans were asking for because of the fact that their full-priced 13-year-old game only sold 800,000 copies. Only. They insisted that they didn't care what people said was wanted, only what their skewed perception of sales charts said. I won't go into further rage-accompanied detail...suffice to say, I've rarely seen a company be so disgustingly open and honest about the fact that they don't give a shit about anything but money, and have no sense of morality, proportion, or shame.

Everything I've said, I feel, more than adequately defends my decision not to support SquareEnix any longer, and my encouragement for anyone and everyone else to boycott them as well. Yet I have to admit, I've come to this decision only recently, with the Chrono Trigger fiasco not being the clincher. I do feel, though, that it SHOULD have been the clincher, that I SHOULD have made this decision then, because SquareEnix's revolting choices as a game developer up to and including that moment more than warranted shunning them. But for me, the last straw was recently, when I found out about the existence of Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals.

I'd planned at the start of this rant to go into detail here about how much I hate Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals. But then I started to really watch a Youtube Let's Play of the game, and I realized that there is no way in hell that I can possibly do this game flaming, painful justice without making an entire separate rant for it--which I certainly will do. But until I do, I'll just have to do a quick sum-up. Basically, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals is SquareEnix taking a true classic of the SNES era, Lufia 2, and...I don't know if you can even CALL it "remaking" the game. Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals is so heinously inferior to and transformed from its original state that SquareEnix calling it a "remake" is basically an outright lie. SquareEnix has remade Lufia 2 the same way your digestive tract remakes a slice of meat-lover's pizza--the end result does, I guess, share something with the beginning product in some tiny way, so you COULD call it a remake, but if you're sensible, you don't. You just call it shit.

That's really all the game is after SquareEnix is done with it. They change the plot's events, they change the villains, they change the characters, they change the characters' relations to each other, they change the ending, they change the look...they change everything even remotely important about an RPG with this remake, along with plenty of stuff that isn't important. And unfortunately, the changes are universally for the worse--it's painfully clear that the creative team making the changes is not nearly as talented (nor, for that matter, invested) as Lufia 2's original team was, and the end result is the complete loss of the creativity, emotion, intelligence, and subtle beauty of the original game. It's like the perfect combination of everything I said SquareEnix does that's bad in this rant so far:

It's them taking something that's already good and ruining it through incompetence, since the resulting story and characters are inferior to the original.
It's them taking something that's already good and cheapening it by pandering to their audience, changing the way characters look and interact to be more generic and shallowly appealing.
It's a remake. Although I guess this one only sort of counts, since, as I said, this thing's been completely hacked apart.
It's them caring absolutely nothing about the feelings of long-time gaming audiences compared to the allure of a cheap buck, as they completely change something great that people enjoyed into an unrecognizable, halfhearted, sloppy mess.

Lufia 2 was elegant and a high-quality RPG. Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals is a shabby mess that kind of embodies everything wrong with SquareEnix today. Really, there's not much more to say on the matter.

So yeah. There you go. The way I see it, SquareEnix has proven through its games, selling strategies, and even official statements that it just plain holds no respect for its customers and has no qualms about taking advantage of them in any way conceivable for a quick, cheap buck. And the company has proven through these same acts and products that it has little to no pride in its creations or sense of artistic integrity, only a relentless greed. I recognize the vital need for a company to turn a profit, but I refuse to accept that company doing so at the sacrifice of ethics, intellectual dignity, and/or respect for its audience. And so, I am no longer going to support SquareEnix by purchasing any product they profit from. Whether or not any of you want to join me on this is your choice, of course--I'd appreciate the company, but I'm content to stand alone, too. But either way, I'm not going to take it any more.











* Okay, fine, the Soulblazer Trilogy and Valkyrie Profile 1 were good, in varying degrees. But they're single shiny coins in the murky, muck-mired bog ditch of Dragon Quest games, Star Ocean 1 and 2, 7th Saga, Robotrek...the list of mind-numbing time-wasters just goes on and on.

** Features that, of course, were entirely unnecessary to begin with.

General RPG Lists: Greatest Vehicles

Over the course of an RPG, the main characters are going to be using at least 2 forms of transportation besides their legs and magic. Whether by land, air, sea, underwater, or space, there are a LOT of options out there in RPGs for machines and animals to get you from one place to another. Sometimes these are stylish. Most often they are definitely not. But today we ask ourselves: out of all the RPGs out there, which rides are the slickest, the sickest, the quickest, the ass-kickest to get you from Point A to Point B in the most awesome way possible?

The answer sheet is below.

(Note: This list assumes the final and/or best upgraded version of all vehicles it lists).



10. Mech Suits (General RPGs)

Yeah, okay, let's face it: anime's got the right idea. Giant battle robots that you pilot are pretty kickass. The Sun Giant in Dark Cloud 1, Buriki Daioh in Live A Live, and pretty much every Mech in Xenogears all kick a lot of ass and look awesome doing it. After all, if you're going to go somewhere, why not do it in a giant robot armed to the teeth with missiles, beam cannons, fists, and whatnot? The only reason Mech Suits don't rate higher on this list is the sad fact that there ARE a few RPG Mechs that actually kind of suck, such as Asgard from Wild Arms 5, which is a pain in the ass to get around in, and has some Generic Giant Mech Action Battles!!!!! that are just trying way, way too hard. But in general, Mech Suits kick butt.


9. Pegasus (General RPGs)

Alright, really, what besides a unicorn is a more elegant, majestic mode of single-person transportation than a Pegasus? Nothing says class like gliding across the air on a winged steed.


8. The Ragnarok (Final Fantasy 8)

The act of saying something positive about FF8 pains me, but even I have to admit that the Ragnarok is a pretty cool ride. A air-to-space vessel with lasers and machine guns, made to resemble a red dragon, complete with grasping claws? Functional, deadly, AND stylish. I may be able to count the aspects of FF8 that didn't suck on 1 hand and have fingers left over, but the Ragnarok's definitely 1 of those used digits--a big thumbs-up.


7. The M-44 Hammerhead (Mass Effect 2)

A smooth-controlling hovercraft that glides along the ground, can blast itself up and over obstacles and fly several dozen feet above the ground for a short time, capable of scanning for and obtaining any objects of interest, armed with an inexhaustible supply of missiles that punch through obstructions and enemies alike. This thing slides along the ground like a dream and kicks ass while doing so.


6. The Sandcraft (Wild Arms 3)

Okay, big transports for crossing endless seas of sand are a pretty common thing in science fiction, and RPGs have adopted a few. But Wild Arms 3's Sandcraft is more than just a way to avoid getting sand in your sock. The Sandcraft is a huge, insanely powerful (once customized) tank that can and will obliterate absolutely anything stupid enough to be in its way. Armed with a big cannon and a huge harpoon, and capable of doing massive amounts of damage to any enemy within eyesight, the Sandcraft is just fucking COOL.


5. The Excerion (Lufia 2)

As RPG ships go, the Excerion doesn't look like much. It also doesn't sport any combat abilities. But man, if you need to get anywhere other than outer space, this ship will get you there. Not only is it a seafaring vessel, but it can also, whenever you like, become an airship. That by itself is pretty handily functional, but the thing also can turn into a submarine and go underwater! That, my friends, is a multi-purpose vehicle.

"But Arpy!" you say, in my whimsical imagination where blog-readers talk out loud to their computer screens. "The ship from Final Fantasy 5 does that, too! Surely you should give this spot to both of them."

Well, yes, the FF5 ship also does that. But the Excerion has one more handy function that puts it above FF5's transport. In the event that the Excerion's big balloon is shot in mid-flight, the ship converts to a giant hang-glider, letting it safely ride the air currents down to the ground instead of being completely destroyed in a crash. Considering how often RPG vehicles are in combat situations, that really is a great contingency to have on a ship that relies on a balloon to keep it in the air. Multi-purpose, AND (presumably) safer than your average RPG airship.


4. Lombardia (Wild Arms 3)

Lombardia is a flying dragon cyborg that can shoot missiles and energy blasts. What more is there to say?


3. The Normandy SR-2 (Mass Effect 2 + 3)

The Normandy is a state-of-the-art spacecraft that can fly in all manners of nasty, otherworldly atmospheres, is armed to the teeth with the exceptionally deadly firepower of the Mass Effect universe, looks awesome, has great armor and shields, and has a stealth feature that makes it completely untraceable to all known forms of sensors and monitoring systems. It's big enough that a full crew of RPG characters can comfortably fit in for long voyages, it can scan planets for helpful resources, it has a fully-equipped kitchen, science lab, medical bay, and armory, a friendly and insanely advanced AI system to help everything run smoothly, and a cargo bay for holding the M-44 Hammerhead I mentioned earlier, as well as a handy transport shuttle. This ship is 100% awesome.


2. The Epoch (Chrono Trigger)

The Epoch is a sleek, small flying machine with some impressive laser weaponry, which is all pretty cool. More importantly, though, it is also a time machine. Any vehicle that can travel through time is already a handy enough ride to warrant consideration for the list, and how often do you come across a time machine as classy and cool-looking as this one, that can also take you to different PLACES in the time you've chosen? The Epoch takes you wherever and whenever you need to go in style.


1. The Delphinus (Skies of Arcadia Legends)

Oh YEAH. Forget riding the skies--this is how you rule them. Cannons, missiles, magic, lasers, the Delphinus is a huge, unstoppable battleship of the air. Flying this thing and taking it into battle makes you feel INVINCIBLE. The Delphinus is pure and utter win in a hull.


Honorable Mention: Pokemon (Pokemon Series)

Trainers can ride their Pokemon through the waves and across the sky, which is darned handy, and pretty cool. I mean, how awesome is it to imagine your trainer tearing across the sky on a huge Aerodactyl, or the burning Moltres? How stylish would it be to part the waves atop an elegant Dragonair, or clinging to a stylish Vaporeon? Very cool.

Of course, the reason why Pokemon don't make the actual list is the same reason that they'd be considered for it--you're using Pokemon for a ride. And yes, this is awesome in some cases, like the ones I mentioned above. On the other hand, it has equal potential to be ridiculous and lame. How awkward would it be to be clumsily pulled along through the water by a Psyduck? Trying to ride or hold onto a Qwilfish as it swims would just be painful. Grasping for dear life to a tiny, scruffy Spearow while it struggles to drag you across the sky isn't exactly a majestic image. So, I credit Pokemon with a mention for having potential for some really cool riding buddies...but I also deny it a real list spot for having equal potential for stupid vehicular choices, too.



And that's that, another list down. Tune in next time, when I go back to making rants with substance!

...Probably.

Dragon Age 1's Add-Ons

So, I did a rant on the various DLCs for Fallout 3, and at the end of it, I wondered how DLC would affect other PC RPGs in the future, and whether companies could be as responsible with it as Bethesda had been with Fallout 3, saying that the then-upcoming Dragon Age would provide a good litmus test. Well, the results are in.

(Take note that I don't really pay attention to little DLC things, like individual items or the Feastday gift/prank items. I'm only really interested in the substantial add-on packages that add quests and locations and such to the game).



The Stone Prisoner: This DLC came free along with the game, so I can't argue the price. A pretty good add-on, too. It added a new, pretty nifty character, Shale the Golem, to the party, and provided not only a small new area and set of mini-quests to obtain Shale, but also another small area and mini-quest later on related to Shale's past. All in all, this was good--Shale is interesting and fun, not to mention integrated well into the main plot, and the side-quests are engaging and have some neat story to them. Definitely a good addition.


Warden's Keep: Y'know, it's funny. Warden's Keep was available for download more or less immediately after DAO's release for $5. Now, that's a pretty small amount of cash, but it's a pretty small extra quest that you get for it. I think it would have made more sense to make Warden's Keep the free DLC with new purchases, and have The Stone Prisoner be the add-on you buy, because with the Stone Prisoner, you get 2 small quest areas instead of 1, and the addition of Shale involves several extra dialogue options and a new character throughout the game. That, to me, would have been worth paying for more than Warden's Keep. Regardless, Warden's Keep provides a new side-quest in a medium-sized new area that fleshes out the history of the Grey Wardens in Ferelden a little. It's fairly informative and interesting. So, good overall.


Return to Ostagar: This is where things kind of fall apart. See, it's like this. Return to Ostagar was originally announced in November 2009 with a release date of "the holiday season." Then, during the holiday season, it didn't come out due to technical issues, and was delayed until early January. Then it was delayed again for a couple weeks due to bugs. Then, when they released it mid-January, it caused all kind of technical difficulties and was recalled and delayed once more. It finally came out at the very end of January.

You know what it was that gamers got after the add-on was 2 months late? About an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours of gameplay with barely any story elements whatsoever. It was basically $5 for the privilege of 2 hours of battling enemies and getting a few new items. THAT'S what took 2 months to make work.

Here's some food for thought. Fallout 3's Downloadable Content packages cost 15 bucks each, and added, on average, about 7 hours of gameplay for me (probably a little less for the average player, I suppose, because I'm given to scavenging for every little thing). Over half of them made for much more time added than that; I probably spent 10 hours playing through the Point Lookout DLC alone. The delays for Fallout 3's DLC add-ons were measured in days, to my recollection. The areas they added were all very large, and I can only assume, with my limited knowledge of programming, that locations, events, and individuals in Fallout 3 must be harder to properly program than in Dragon Age Origins, simply because there's more detail to the world in general and more that can be done within it. So Bethesda charged, if you average it all out, less for a bigger add-on with more to do in it that added more game time that probably involved more work to program, and managed to do so more or less on time.

Even without having Fallout 3's DLCs up for comparison, Return to Ostagar's pretty bland and doesn't add enough to the game to make it worth even a measly 5 dollars. And with the Fallout 3 example to compare to...it's quite frankly something Bioware should feel embarrassed about.


Awakening: Awakening isn't technically a DLC, as you buy it in a store and install it from a disc, but what the hell, I'll count expansions. Awakening isn't bad. The new adventure is moderately good, although I wound up feeling like the main character is a secondary player in Awakening's events. It seems like everything about the plot that would have been really interesting, creative, and notable is all happening just above the protagonist's head, and as a result, you never get to see most of the important parts of the damn plot. The new characters are generally okay, but no one save Oghren has the kind of depth that most of the characters did in the main Dragon Age Origins quest--and Oghren's a returning comedy relief character from there, so he only sort of counts. In fact, only half of them have depth at all, now that I'm really considering it. I take it back; the new cast can't be called "generally okay" if only half of them have any depth worth mentioning, and if that character depth isn't all that great.

And I once again have to look at the ratio of cost to game play here. When it was released, Awakening cost about, what, 40 bucks? That's just about the price for a new RPG. I didn't get 40 dollars' worth of content. From start to finish, with me doing and getting just about every damn thing in the expansion, I played Awakening for a few minutes less than 19. People are saying that Awakening takes about 25 hours to complete, so I dunno what THEY were doing that took them so long, but for me, the complete experience came to 18 hours and 51 minutes--and again, I was pretty thorough. To draw once again on Fallout 3 as an example, the Broken Steel DLC package for Fallout 3 extended the game past its ending to include several new quests, areas, and stuff to do while continuing the story line, not to mention optional small sidequests. I spent, oh, say maybe 10 hours playing that one. You know how much it cost? $15, like all the other Fallout 3 DLCs. 15 bucks for 10 hours of game play that extends the plot in a cool and engaging way as opposed to 40 bucks for 19 hours that creates a new but rather mediocre adventure? I didn't need the comparison to Fallout 3 to know this, but putting it out there helps cement this simple fact: Dragon Age Origins's Awakening expansion is a rip-off. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.


Darkspawn Chronicles: Back to regular DLC packages with this one. I feel like Bioware was honestly trying with this one, coming up with a decent idea for this one: play through an alternate universe version of the final battle, in a reality where the main character never existed...and for that matter, play through as one of the bad guys. Sounds good, right? Well, it would be, in a lot of RPGs. Unfortunately, Bioware forgot one important detail: the main bad guys of Dragon Age Origins are Darkspawn.

Here's the deal. I love it when I get to play as the villain for a while and see things from their perspective in an RPG. The majority of characters on my list of the best RPG villains ever fit this--Fou-Lu (Breath of Fire 4) and Orsted (Live-A-Live) you directly control as they form the conclusions that bring them to their roles as villains, and Darth Traya (Knights of the Old Republic 2) is in your party for most of the game. The more time you, the player, spend with a villain, the better chance the villain has of being developed into a deep and excellent bad guy.

The problem in this instance is that the villain you're spending time with in this DLC is a Darkspawn. A Darkspawn commander, yes, but a Darkspawn. Darkspawn, for those unfamiliar with DAO (although I don't know why you'd have read this far if that's the case), are...basically, zombie orcs, I would describe them as. Take the orcs from The Lord of the Rings, take away their ability to speak or perform any complex reasoning, make it so that hanging around them for too long can kill you and/or make you into one, make'em look ever so slightly zombie-ish, and you have a Darkspawn.

So you're not really controlling a proper villain, or even a bad guy with the power of speech. You're just controlling a semi-mindless goon, with the only dialogue in the entire add-on being your boss's psychic commands, which are short, to the point, and not terribly interesting. And as for the whole alternate-reality-where-the-main-character-didn't-exist thing, all the information on it that you get are brief entries in your journal that provide tidbits about the game's events and how they were different. Yay.

I realize that it wouldn't be realistic to have a bunch of Darkspawn have deep, involved characters, given what the Darkspawn are supposed to be. But accepting that there's no way to make the idea work in a meaningful and compelling way doesn't excuse it; it just means that they should have dropped it and moved on to another idea that they COULD make worthwhile. Sometimes an idea just can't work. And this is an example of that. All you're paying for are a few extra battles under slightly different circumstances than usual. There's nothing of substance here. This DLC isn't worth the cost. Hell, even if it were free, it wouldn't be worth your time.


Leliana's Song: After the the Darkspawn Chronicles DLC, it's a relief to see that Bioware CAN make a side-story DLC that actually incorporates a plot. While I wouldn't call it amazing, and I think many aspects of the conflict in Leliana's past shown in this DLC deserved more attention than they got (I would have liked to see more involvement of the Chantry with Leliana, seen a little more evidence of its eventual importance in her life...and I wish we had seen more of Marjolaine's perception and paranoia of Leliana's similarities to herself), this one's definitely a solid DLC package. It gives a glimpse into the past of my favorite character in the game, developing her a little further, and also provides a few tidbits of interest about Dragon Age's world's history and politics.


Golems of Amgarrak: Aaaaand after our brief dalliance with some quality, we're back to unimpressive, rather pointless DLCs. Sigh. There's nothing especially wrong with Golems of Amgarrak, but there's certainly nothing noteworthy about it. The self-contained plot is underdeveloped and frankly cliche as hell ("Yes, you had to give up on what you thought you wanted...but you've learned that family is the most important thing of all!"), not to mention seems largely irrelevant to anything else related to Dragon Age's world and events, and the characters are a perfect match to the plot--underdeveloped and bland.


Witch Hunt: So...let me get this straight. You've got a post-game DLC where they bring back one party member from the game proper to join you, and it's the Mabari Hound...and they once AGAIN spend no effort to make him anything more than a drooling, peeing lummox, repeating a mistake they made for 50 hours or so already for another 2 or 3 extra. You've got a post-game DLC where the 2 new characters actually seem to have some mild potential to be interesting characters...and the DLC is too short to flesh them out properly, so they're quirky, incidental personalities at the very most. You've got a post-game DLC whose official description indicates that it's there to answer why Morrigan left at the end of the main Dragon Age 1 game's events, and, to quote the official Bioware site for this DLC, "tie up this last loose end once and for all," finding out what her intentions were and what she plans to do now and so on...and you get a 2-to-3-hour-long investigation that concludes with a 5-minute talk with Morrigan that tells you nothing you didn't already know, answers no questions at all, and only poses new ones. Seriously, Morrigan basically says, "Hey sup. I know you tracked me down to find out about the baby and all, but it's, like, super magic special and stuff, my evil mom's not dead and is evil, I'm leaving you guys behind--for REALZ this time, dawg--and you can't follow me, and basically there are a bunch of mystical magical divine mumbo-jumbo Dungeons and Dragons things at work that I can't tell you about at all. So basically, everything I already said the last time I saw you, just with a little extra flourish. Kthx bye."

There are basically 2 ways I can respond to this DLC. I am going to be very charitable, and conclude that this was a case of incompetence. They wanted to make suspenseful, interesting implications about things that will (maybe) come up in later games, and they just couldn't figure out a way to do that while properly answering our questions and revealing plot points to us. They planned poorly, and didn't have the writing talent to pull off what they'd intended without giving either too much or too little.

The other way I could respond to this DLC is to imagine it as the result not of incompetence, but of dishonest, abusive greed, a disingenuous case of them dangling an alluring carrot in front of their fans' noses, with no intention of giving it to them, only of lightening the fans' wallets to the tune of 7 bucks each. As I said, I'm going to be charitable and assume that this is a case of incompetence rather than despicable exploitation...for now. But as I play and pay for more and more add-ons from Bioware, it gets harder and harder to see their business practices and development decisions as having any more integrity than those of the Patron Saint of crooked, dishonest RPG companies, SquareEnix.



And that's that--according to Bioware, Witch Hunt was the last additional content Bioware for Dragon Age 1. So, back to the progenitor of this rant--after Fallout 3's brief but periodic add-ons, how does Dragon Age hold up?

Not very well. Not very damn well, at all. The first 2 packages were good, and I enjoyed Leliana's Song, but the rest of it? A sad collection of drivel, is all it is. We get packages that are:


Boring and Insignificant (Golems of Amgarrak)
100% Irrelevant (Darkspawn Chronicles)
A Huge Rip-Off (Awakening)
Outright Stupid (Witch Hunt)
So Late and Lacking That it's Shameful (Return to Ostagar)


And most of these crappy add-ons can apply to more than one category, too.

So what's the verdict? Well, when I left my Fallout 3 DLC rant, I was optimistic about how Bioware would handle Add-Ons, but wary that they might not use them responsibly. In the end, I was obviously right to be wary--there just seems to be a lack of competence here on the part of the writers AND, at times, the programmers that really hurts DA1's offerings of Add-Ons. And there are times, which I've mentioned, where these packages of extra content are such bad deals (especially when compared to Fallout 3's) that it looks suspiciously like exploitative, undignified business practices. Still, I'm not entirely angry or disappointed about this collection. It's bad, but as I said at the end of the Fallout 3 rant, DLCs could easily be abused to intentionally withhold content from gamers from the start until they pay more money--basically, holding legitimate parts of the game hostage as extras. And it really doesn't feel like Bioware did this--the Add-Ons of Dragon Age 1 almost all really do feel like extras.*

So in the end, Dragon Age 1's Add-Ons as a whole are pretty poor...but they don't come off to me as being the result of dishonest business practices so much as being early mistakes made by a company trying to figure out how to do them regularly. Once they're finished with Mass Effect 2's DLC packages, I suppose we'll see whether they were learning from their mistakes or not.











* The Stone Prisoner would be the exception to the rule. But it came free with a new copy of the game, so no harm, no foul.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess AMV: The Cinematic Experience

Well, it's been a little while since I had an AMV rant for you all. Simple reason for that, too--I ran out of good ones. Yeah, out of the literally dozens and dozens of AMVs I look over every few times a year for every RPG I've played to date, which has to total in the hundreds by now, I only had about half a dozen that I thought were high enough quality to make a rant about. That's probably the worst track record I've seen for fan-related works, an even worse ratio of good to bad offerings than Fanfiction.net's Final Fantasy 8 section.

At any rate, though, whilst recently perusing the AMVs created at Youtube and AMV.org since last I checked, I DID find another noteworthy subject, one made by a certain Roynerer, that's not only very good, but rather distinctive, too. Oh, and long. Like, 8 minutes. Just to let you know in advance. Oh, and this is DEFINITELY one of those AMVs that needs a SPOILERS warning slapped all over it--you're gonna essentially be seeing the plot of the game from start to finish here, so, y'know, fairly warned.


The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Cinematic Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFVLxDoURg


Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm Ready for my Close-Up: The visual quality of the videos used is good enough, nothing to complain about nor particularly praise. The videos' nature, of course, is fairly noteworthy, as the visual component to TLoZ: Twilight Princess was both impressive and aesthetically effective.

The artistry of the video, though, is pretty much the main event. Roynerer hasn't thrown any notable visual tricks into the AMV, but they would be out of place, even distracting, from what he DOES use the video component for: telling a concise, yet epic and powerful, version of TLoZ: Twilight Princess's story. This AMV uses key scenes throughout the game to show the watcher the main arcs of game's events, from the beginning of Link's journey and transformation, to meeting Midna, the spirits, Zelda, Zant, and Ganondorf, to the final battle and Midna's emotional goodbye. The AMV is showing the most plot-relevant scenes during his journey, and interspersing these scenes with several quick clips of the various tasks Link engages in during the game's course, from fighting to riding the river.

This by itself is a skillful move for Roynerer's purposes--the plot-essential scenes obviously tell the game's epic story as he intends them to, but the scenes thrown in here and there that show some of the tasks and battles Link goes through on the way to the important plot points effectively conveys the length and spectrum of the journey, showing the viewer that much effort and time is expended to get from one event to the next in a way that just showing us the important parts wouldn't manage. At the same time, though, there are only a few such images, leaving most of the AMV to be filled with the story-telling scenes, which is important when you have a longer one like this (let's face it: attention spans ain't what they used to be). Roynerer also employs some smart scene selection for the major plot parts of the AMV, cutting and pasting the videos of each event to give you a concise summary of each part that tells you as much as you need to know for the story, without adding unnecessary time to the AMV.* It works pretty impressively well, creating a fairly understandable and straightforward take on the story that's shown well enough that I suspect even those not familiar with the game would have little trouble following it, while sacrificing little to none of the story's power and grandeur--if anything, this summarized version better emphasizes the epic nature of Twilight Princess's plot than the game does. Even more impressive when you consider that the AMV tells the story entirely visually--none of the game's dialogue that accompanies the scenes is shown. Roynerer takes artistic, stirring visuals from a really cool story, and edits them together to make the whole product better. This AMV is, simply put, great to watch.

I Gotta Have More Cowbell: The music used in this AMV is comprised of several parts of the soundtrack for the movie The Last Samurai, composed by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is, apparently, one of Roynerer's musical heroes (and the same goes for my sister--she just loves The Last Samurai's music), and one can certainly see (well, hear, anyway) why--regardless of your musical tastes, it would be hard not to recognize this music as strong, moving, and masterful.

Now, under normal circumstances, the visual part of this AMV would certainly be its highest virtue--as I describe above, it accomplishes a great deal with its video portion, and does so with excellence. But with this AMV, the audio component is actually an equally strong part of what makes it great--and once again, this is a combination of the music itself being great, and the skill of the AMV's creator. The score to The Last Samurai is at many points designed to be epic, and Roynerer takes full advantage of it--in fact, he goes beyond what I'd consider "taking full advantage." That implies (to me, at least) working with a song perfectly within the normal expected, established parameters of that song. I believe, however, that Roynerer's selection of which pieces of music to put where makes great use of it in ways that were not intended. See, one of the really great things about The Last Samurai's music is that it's meant to be the mood-creating theme to a movie about Japan at (I think) the end of its feudal age; it takes its cues from traditional Japanese sound, and creates and emphasizes the movie's Japanese setting at least as much as any visual aspect of The Last Samurai.

Basically, what I am saying here is that this soundtrack really sounds Japanese.

Yet, when I watch this AMV and see the scenes that the music plays to...it becomes transformed to me, somehow. Put to the well-chosen and entrancing Twilight Princess scenes, the music seems to meld with the game's video, and suddenly the epic and emotional music doesn't sound like it was taken from another source--it becomes such a connected part of the AMV that it sounds like it was somehow made for THIS. Seriously, when I watch this AMV, everything clicks so perfectly that the music doesn't seem like it was taken from something else and put into this--it's like it was MADE for this game's visuals. It's hard to describe how it happens, especially since I don't know much about cinematography and music to begin with, but the pace at which the visuals tell their story matches the music's tone and pace perfectly throughout the AMV, and that, along with the individual scene segments fitting extremely well with the moments of the song that accompany them, makes the song clips seem less a separate entity's music and more like they were designed around this AMV. That's an illusion that requires a lot of skill to create and maintain.

Also, as I mentioned, the individual scenes shown to the music are often flawlessly matched to its tone, coordinated as well as any AMV I've reviewed so far. My favorite example of this is at 1:22, when Link turns around and sees Zant. The music characterizes the visual wonderfully, taking a sudden, surprising dip into a deeper set of notes that work with the sudden appearance of the bizarre and formidable mask of Zant to startle the viewer and emphasize the unsettling nature of the villain in a slightly unnerving, almost regal way. And I'd like to note that it's also an excellent example of the AMV taking the music and changing how the listener reacts to it...this moment in the music is, in The Last Samurai, used for a moment of strong emotion in a way that you would expect. It's used perfectly, but conventionally, in its original use. Yet in this application, where the same moment of the song is used to convey unsettling, shocking imagery and timing to properly create a feel for Zant, it works equally well--it's a completely different way of using the same moment of music, yet it feels equally natural.

Overall, the scene's a really cool coordination of audio and visual and my favorite individual moment in this AMV, although it's very far from the only one--I'm not going into detail on the others simply because they go throughout the AMV, many, many scenes and moments mirroring and meshing with the music's mood of pitches, tones, and crescendos, singular scenes that sync with the sound so well and so successively that they simply become whole segments of superb coordination.**

Guy, You Explain: Like a few others I've reviewed, the point of this AMV is to provide a summary for the game, to give you an idea of its epic power and grandeur. Unlike the ones I've done here before, though (not to mention practically all other AMVs I've seen), this is no attempt to communicate the general feel and emotion of the game--this AMV actually attempts to show you the game's plot from start to finish, using the scenes of important events in the plot to give you a basic, but effective, story to watch. It's done so well that a person who hasn't played the game before would, I imagine, have very little difficulty following the AMV's story (and thus, the game's) from start to finish from this musical movie and pretty much understand most of the game's important ideas and plot points. Roynerer has told me,

"The idea just kinda sparked one night as I was trying to look for a new way to be creative and productive within the music area...which then resulted in the idea of making a short movie-like sequence made up of footage from a game, carefully structured around specifically chosen orchestral music. Orchestral music helps tell the story and grip the viewer a lot better, you see.

"...after the first section of the video was finished, I found it rather enticing, I said to myself that this has to be big, different, nothing like other AMVs on YouTube; I wanted it to be gripping, meaningful and in tune with the music I'd chosen."

Creative, movie-like, gripping, meaningful, and in tune? Mission Accomplished on each. This is a fresh and engaging idea for AMVs that I hope to see more of. The combination of a great set of visuals with a cool story set to an epic and emotional score makes it very movie-like. From start to finish, the AMV grasps the watcher's attention masterfully, impressing us with its power and feeling, gripping us like few AMVs can. Meaningful? I think there are scenes from TLoZ Twilight Princess that this AMV conveys more impressively than the game itself does, and if you can find any meaning within the game (and it's definitely there), you can find it almost perfectly preserved within this AMV--indeed, the meaning may even be better off in this form, because it's all presented together, rather than over the course of 50 hours. And in tune? I already mentioned earlier that this is so "in tune" that it basically BECOMES the tune.

TLoZTP: The Cinematic Experience is really just a splendid work. The care and skill in it is practically palpable, and I can't recommend enough that anyone and everyone check it out.

















* To be critically fair, this may have been done as much out of necessity as of artistic considerations--the original version of this, according to my correspondence with Roynerer, was 12 minutes long, which won't fly on Youtube with its short-sighted demand that all videos on it be in the 10 minute range or less. Regardless of what could have been, though, the version we have now is good AND efficient, so I still feel it fair to count this as one of its virtues.

** Why yes, I DO like alliteration, now that you mention it.

Startropics 1's Password

Startropics was a delightful little game released way, way back in the days of the NES. It has a special place in my heart as one of the first games I ever beat, and, provided that you count it as an RPG (which I do), probably the first RPG I ever played from start to finish.* And I think it holds up pretty well against time, too--it's got a decent enough plot, there's a certain lighthearted personality to it that you still, to this day, don't find very often in an RPG, and, providing you're one of those people who count gameplay as an important part of an RPG, it's still fun to play--in a refreshing way, even, since few games in the past 2 decades have tried to copy its exact feel.

There are, for me, 2 really notable aspects of this game that I feel are worth recognizing here. The first I've already covered--the game's ending, which is strangely powerful for the little game, yet not so epic that it's over the top in such a title. The second, however, is a clever little gimmick.

I've mentioned in a previous rant that I really do like the idea of interesting swag that comes packaged with a game--stuff like a game's soundtrack, or that marvelous little Vault Boy bobblehead figure that came with Fallout 3. It's not always good, of course--FF12's metal case was pointless, and its little bonus disc on the history of the FF series was little more than a stupid advertisement--but it's generally an effort I appreciate. And I appreciated it even all the way back to when I was 7 or 8, when I opened up the Startropics 1 box and found that with my game came a neat little mock letter from Dr. J, a character from the game, to his nephew, the main character, which basically just set the premise for the game. "Neat!" I thought, and set it aside.

Well, as it turns out, that letter was actually a part of the game itself. See, it's like this. There's a part in the game where you need to put in a password to your little navigating robot to continue on with the quest. The game gives you no information on what it is, with its only hint being to put the letter Dr. J sent Mike (the hero) into water. The game, of course, has no letter item in its inventory, and I found myself wondering exactly how I was supposed to accomplish this in-game if Mike didn't still have the letter on him. I spent some time looking for the item, in case I had missed it, but couldn't find anything.

And then I remembered the letter that came with the game itself.*** Wondering if an idea this crazy could actually be the solution, I found it amongst the junk in my room, ran out to the kitchen, and held it under the faucet for a moment. A moment later, lo and behold, across its bottom appeared a secret message with the code.

If only I knew any proper swear words at that point. I could have properly conveyed my feelings: Holy shit that is so cool.

It's just an example of really neat, creative thinking going into the design of a game puzzle. Where so many RPGs are content with just pushing crates into the right place, or having the sheer genius to be able to press the "Search" button in front of something really suspicious in order to find a password or essential item, Startropics 1 included in its neat puzzles one that required sleuth work in the real world, making a plot-essential item an actual, real object. What a neat, creative thing to put in the game it was. Kudos to Nintendo for such a nifty idea!












* "Probably" because I'm not ENTIRELY sure about this--it MIGHT have been The Magic of Scheherazade. My memory's a little foggy on this; it WAS something like 20 years ago.**

** Jesus CHRIST how the hell did I get so old?

*** Yeah, yeah, I know it seems obvious enough to figure out from the start, but give me a break. I was in the second grade. At that point, my deductive reasoning with video games peaked at "Hey, that enemy has spikes on his head. Maybe I shouldn't jump on him."

Terranigma's Theme of Advancement

Proof that Enix WAS, in fact, capable of creating a good RPG prior to the merger with Squaresoft, despite all the contrary evidence provided by Dragon Quest and Star Ocean,* Terranigma has become quite a favorite among fans of old, obscure RPGs in the past decade, thanks to emulation making it possible for Americans to play it--the game was only ever released in Japan and Europe. The old SNES Action RPG was very creative, had a generally entertaining protagonist, and a plot and setting that took a look at several interesting themes, most of which seemed to revolve around the idea of essential contradictions.

My favorite theme of Terranigma, I think, would have to be its portrayal of technological and social advancement. The goal set for Ark (Terranigma's protagonist) is to resurrect the dead Earth's lands and life forms, and then to nurture human advancement to quickly bring the world to a modern state. Ark is thus present to witness several events and inventions that forever changed the flow of human history, technology, and culture, and helps in several cases to bring them about. Ark's actions (if you choose to do everything in the game, that is) advance culture in the fields of naval navigation, preparing and keeping food, art, economics, foreign trade and travel, alcohol, and (most of all) scientific progress, among others. He nurtures such monumental technologies as telephones, airplanes, and usable electrical power. And as he does all this, the towns of the world change, going from your standard RPG villages to modern cities.

It's a pretty neat process, honestly, even if the game's translation is, as was often the case back in the SNES days, not always great at conveying the game's elegance properly. What I really love about it, though, is that the game tries to show both sides of cultural advancement, both the good and the bad, in several different ways.

The first aspect of advancement it looks at is the basics of success. The painter Matis provides a good example of this. Matis is a poor, largely ignored painter who wants to show his works to others, hoping to find people out there who enjoy the work he pours his soul into. He thus gives Ark an example of his work, and asks Ark to show it to others to get their opinions and interest. After Ark shows it to a famous and rich critic who likes it, Matis becomes famous, and orders for his paintings begin pouring in. Eventually Matis's fame, however, leads to him being overworked, and by the end of the game, he says, "Before fame, I thought it was great just to paint. Now look! I work like a machine for money chased by time. This is no good! Even if it sells, it's no good if it's not what you want to paint." Through Matis, as well as some others that Ark meets, the game shows the desire for success and its rewards of a bigger business and home, wealth, and popularity, but it also shows the downside of the success that comes with advancement, the way that success can take over one's life and draw the pleasure from what one does.

The next aspect are the effects of cultural advancement in general, which are shown through the games' several towns and how they grow. As Ark promotes the world's sciences, economy, culture, and globalization, the small villages he visits become large towns and finally modern cities. The benefits are easy enough to see--modern comforts become available to all, there are more pastimes for the people of the cities, and international trade and tourism brings new goods, money, and visitors to each city. But at the same time, the game shows the bad with the good. Many residents complain about how crowded, busy, and complicated life is now, while the animals that Ark saved earlier in the game and that helped him along his quest suffer for mankind's success, being taken from their homes to be put in a zoo, or sold on the black market.

The last aspect, and that of particular note, is the consequence of advancing technology. I feel that the game does especially well with this. It treats great moments of scientific history with reverence quite often--the successful use of Columbus's navigation methods to reach a new continent is played out as quite a big moment in history, and the discovery of how to harness electricity to create light is treated with such reverence in the game that the moment almost seems divine. The usefulness of scientific advancement, as well as the yearning to create a better life through invention, is treated as a marvelous thing in Terranigma.

Yet, at the same time, the game also shows how much is lost with the spread of high technology. Bell remarks that his phones are a huge success, and wonders casually if perhaps people can no longer live without having the instant ability to hear others' voices. A random NPC scoffs at many of the legendary and mystic ideas of old as silly and impossible in such an advanced world (even though Ark has encountered many of these things), showing the loss of belief in legend and the intangible brought on by the modern world. Columbus laments that his navigation methods, so monumental and important before, now seem old fashioned, even quaint, in this world of airplanes and television, showing that scientific advancement can even cause a lack of appreciation for itself. The use of technology for the creation of attack robots and a super virus in the game shows the dangers that technology can have, of course. Most telling of all to me are the words of Eddie,** the one who harnessed electricity into a light bulb: "I worry about how much light from electricity has changed our lives. It may have stolen the warmth like a candle's flame from human souls."

Technology and advancement in general can do great things for us, but we can also lose much because of it, and Terranigma tries hard to show both sides of the coin. Having seen this double-sided nature to the world's progress throughout the game makes the game's ending, in which Ark looks down on the world he's created and nurtured and sees it for all its greatness, all the more poignant, for we know that the greatness comes at a cost, and we know that Ark is aware of this. Terranigma does a fine job with its theme of the joys and despair of human advancement.

















* Keep in mind I said PRIOR to the merger. Star Ocean 3 and Dragon Quest 8, which are actually good games, wouldn't count.

** Don't ask me why the game can't be bothered to just call him Edison when it's got people like Bell and Columbus in there by name. Then again, they misspelled Matisse as Matis for some reason, too. Who knows why, I guess.

General RPGs' Curative Falls

Thanks to my sister GHTLovesTHG for this rant idea.

Here's a question. Why is it that, in an RPG (and almost every other entertainment medium, but as usual, I just focus on the RPG side of things), falling to your death almost never results in dying?

Think about it. How many times in an RPG have you ever seen a character die from a seemingly lethal plunge down the side of a cliff, or off an airship, or whatever? Admittedly, minor characters can be killed by falls--Dyne from Final Fantasy 7 and Barinten from FF Tactics, for example--but no one with any particularly strong relevance to the plot ever is. If you ever see someone important leap off a height of hundreds of feet and you don't actively watch them perish, and they weren't already dead or dying when they did it, they didn't die.

Examples? Why, I thought you'd never ask.


A. Final Fantasy 6: After the airship is destroyed in midair, everyone falls off it from what we can safely assume is a huge height. Aside from Celes hitting her head and being in a coma for a year, everyone winds up being just fine after falling from an air transport in the sky--right in the middle of Armageddon, I might add.

B. Final Fantasy 7: (SPOILERS--BUT REALLY, DO ANY OF YOU NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS GAME BY NOW?) During Cloud's flashback, the bridge over a huge and deep chasm between mountain peaks comes apart while Sephiroth, Zack, Tifa, Cloud, and Miscellaneous Shinra Grunt are traveling across it. Big surprise, the grunt is the only one who dies, and everyone else, after falling far down into the abyss that you can't even see through the mist and distance, is perfectly okay.

C. Xenosaga 2: Early in the game, Jin and Margulis have a fight that results in Margulis falling through the roof of a building, down into darkness. Now, the actual height of his fall isn't specified, but since he doesn't just hop back up or shout that he'll be back in no time, and since Jin seems convinced that he's not going to return for a good measure of time, it's only reasonable to presume that he fell quite a ways. And, of course, he survived just fine and dandy.

D. Tales of the Abyss: After a fight between the heroes and several of the God Generals on a snowy mountain, the fight's noise and seismic collateral damage causes an avalanche that engulfs the combatants and sweeps them off the cliff's face. Naturally, being hit by an avalanche and thrown off the edge of a mountainous cliff kills all of...most of...some of...actually, every person involved survives with no significant injuries.


See what I mean, here? It's like RPG characters are impervious to the consequences of gravity. I mean, don't get me wrong, there are times when this is decently sensible and okay, like in Tales of Legendia, when Senel falls off a cliff but survives because we see him caught by mystical glowing energy stuff, or when Yuna in Final Fantasy 10 takes a plunge off that Bevelle wedding tower thing and summons her flying Aeon to catch her, or even in Arc the Lad 2 when Gruga falls off a platform down to the lava, but turns out to have caught himself on the edge or something and climbs back up. If the game SHOWS me or at the very least TELLS me how they survive, and it's actually FEASIBLE, then I have no problem with it. But that's only rarely the case.

Worse still, however, is not the fall that doesn't kill you--it's the Curative Fall. A Curative Fall is an occurrence in an RPG where not only doesn't a fall manage to kill someone, but that someone who survives it should have died anyway from other causes. Basically, the person who falls is in really bad shape, but, somehow, they wind up being just fine after the fall brings them off-screen for a while, even though they should have died not only from the drop, but from their current injuries. Plot-wise, the fall seems to have CURED them from their otherwise fatal wounds, rather than increase the damage.

Instances of this phenomenon:


A. Final Fantasy 7: After being sliced deeply across the chest by one of those standard Ridiculously Huge RPG swords, Sephiroth is lifted up, slammed into the wall, and falls into the heart of a reactor that runs on radioactive magic. Does the drop's impact aggravate his grievous wound at all? Doesn't seem so, cuz he's just fine later on.

B. Tales of the Abyss: So Van has been beaten to shit by his adversaries, and is surely going to die from his injuries. But look, he's falling off the platform, into the planet's core! I guess he's dead, right? Well, only if by "dead" you mean "he'll be just fine and will come back stronger than ever."

C. Final Fantasy 8: At the conclusion of a rough battle while on a mission, Laguna, Kiros, and Ward are in a bad way in enemy territory--Laguna's beat up and exhausted, Kiros is so badly injured he can't get up, and Ward is like Kiros only with his neck slashed open. What does Doctor Laguna prescribe for his dying friends? Why, heaving their broken bodies over the side of a cliff to the rough sea several stories below, of course! Naturally, hitting the water whilst a bloody, dying mess and being forced to swim for who knows how far is just the miracle cure Laguna was hoping for, as all 3 fellows survive the event. Rather than death, the only permanent consequence of their wounds and the aggravation to said wounds of a fall and power swim is that Ward can't talk. Everything else is A-OK!

D. Final Fantasy 4 (there IS a lot of falling in this series, isn't there?): Okay, yeah, see, Cid is flying this airship, and for reasons that only kind of make sense, he jumps off of it with a bomb in his hand or strapped to his chest or caught in his beard or something. The point is, a bomb goes off that is right next to him, the explosion of which is large and destructive enough to blast the hell out of the nearby rocky underground cliff face, while he is falling through the air from a height that can only be multiple miles high, down to a very hard and rocky underworld surface that may or may not have lava on it. This causes me to theorize that there is actually a second rule to go with the one stating that no one dies from falling: the more inescapably fatal a fall should be, the greater its curative effect. This at-least-60-years-old mechanic has a bomb go off in his face, yet somehow the healing power of him accelerating to an incredible velocity then slamming into a hard and unmoving surface manages to piece his smithereens back together so effectively that the next time you see him, he's just sleeping it off in a bed.


THIS IS NOT HOW GRAVITY WORKS, PEOPLE.

Mass Effect 1's Downloadable Content

When I did my Fallout 3 DLC rant, I thought at the time that the next game I would be giving a similar review of would be Dragon Age Origins. But as it turns out, Bioware just keeps releasing one thing for it after another, and supposedly has no intention to stop for a while. So whilst I wait for that to end so I can answer the question I ended with in the Fallout 3 DLC rant (whether or not other RPGs would be able to follow Fallout 3's example with as much, less, or more integrity), let's take a look at semi-old school RPG Downloadable Content with Mass Effect 1.



Bring Down the Sky: This is a very good DLC. First of all, it's free (to PC users, at least; X-Box gamers might have to pay for it, but I can only speak from a PC gamer's perspective here). That's always good. More importantly, though, it adds a new mission to the game that's about an hour long, and has a small but reasonably exciting plot and premise while introducing a villain and species that further expand and flesh out the Mass Effect universe interestingly, giving you a glimpse at certain aspects of galactic society and humanity's private inter-species concerns that the game proper doesn't explore. It also gives another couple opportunities for the player to further develop Shepard's personality. A solid add-on, to be sure.


Pinnacle Station: After Bring Down the Sky, Pinnacle Station is a disappointment. It's basically just a combat simulator for you to test how long you can survive a constant stream of enemies, with a few different locations and objectives to very slightly mix things up. The story to go along with the station is tiny and utterly meaningless; just calling the events of Pinnacle Station a "story" at all is an exaggeration. Bland, meaningless, not worth the cost, and disappointing. Still, I HAVE seen considerably blander, less meaningful, less monetarily worthwhile, and more disappointing DLCs by far, so I can't be too terribly harsh, I suppose. At least it wasn't outright stupid, the way Fallout 3's Mothership Zeta DLC was.



Actually, those 2 are the only add-ons released for Mass Effect 1. ME1's DLC seemed to be an experiment for Bioware in large part, testing out their ability to do DLC packages, and both gamers' immediate (Bring Down the Sky) and long-term (Pinnacle Station) interest in continuing the game. I'd say the experiment was positive on the whole--Bring Down the Sky outweighs Pinnacle Station, in my opinion, so the overall feeling I take from this game's add-ons is a good one. But once I can do a complete rant on Dragon Age Origins's add-ons, we'll see whether Bioware took this experiment's results and went in the right or wrong direction with them.

Fallout 1 and 2's Stupid Protagonists

A common trait of Western-style RPGs is the ability to choose what kind of person your protagonist is through their actions. In games like Dragon Age Origins, the Knights of the Republic series, and the Mass Effect series, you have the opportunity in most of the game's situations to choose how your character will respond to dialogue or deal with a situation. This typically boils down to your character being a super nice, understanding fellow who saves everyone always, makes everyone feel good about themselves, and walks on water, which he has turned into wine...or a complete and total douchebag who destroys everything, pees on puppies, and eats children.

It's a fairly good idea, making the games into actual Role-Playing Games by giving you some control over who your character is, and the RPGs I've played usually do a good job of it, allowing for quite a lot of distinction between the characters you can create.* But Fallout 1 and 2 gave players a 3rd option--you could be Good, Evil...and Stupid.

Basically, when you start a Fallout game, you get to choose the stat build of your character, deciding what areas he/she will be strong in, what his/her skills will be, etc. This, of course, affects the game in many ways, and a character with higher Intelligence will have more and better dialogue options in many situations. However, the Fallout designers had some fun with this idea, and made it so that having an extremely low Intelligence score (3 or below) would actually get rid of most normal dialogue options, and replace them with entirely new ones--the often meaningless babble of a complete imbecile.

And man, is it hilarious.

Although you only get a few really funny moments in Fallout 1, Fallout 2 is just full of extremely amusing situations arising from a world-saving protagonist who is dumb as a stump. Stumbling around the post-apocalyptic wasteland as a simpleton more interested in ice cream and shiny objects than with their mission and the fate of the world is just loads of fun. Granted, you don't get to do as much stuff, as many people don't want to entrust all their problems to a grinning moron, but there're still plenty of side quests available to a stupid character, and all the necessary stuff on the path to completing the game will work out for you. It's actually funny to watch a stupid character basically manage on dumb luck to do everything a regular character has to work at to save the world.

There are even occasions where being a stupid character makes parts of the game easier, or provides a better reward. A stupid character can more or less just walk into Vault City and gain access to its Vault, where normally you have to buy or fast-talk your way into the city, and then do a long quest or have crazily good stats to get into the city's Vault. A stupid character will, in the town of Modoc, get paid with a partially eaten cookie for a pest control job, an option not open to a regular character. You wouldn't THINK that's actually a good thing, but the cookie is a very rare item that can temporarily boost how many actions you can take in combat, which is a pretty big deal in a tough fight. And in San Francisco, a stupid character who completes the Brotherhood of Steel's tasks will be rewarded as a regular character would, but be given the bonus of having the tanker ship fully fueled, something that a normal character has to do an extra quest for.

So the game does play a bit differently here and there for this third character path. More importantly, though, the dialogue is just absurdly funny quite often. In a generally dark and serious game, you get to watch a nitwit run around and...

Have his/her feelings hurt by jeering 10-year-olds, and try to get them back by telling them that he/she is going to go to a party with cake and ice cream and presents and that THEY aren't invited.
Walk off in the middle of an involved conversation because he/she becomes distracted by some nearby sand.
Obtain plot-essential computer parts only because he/she is hungry and they look like electronic Pop-Tarts.
Get electrocuted while exploring the insides of a computer, having confused an automated voice for a woman trapped inside the computer in need of rescue.

And so on. It's a really fun third alternative to the usual Good and Evil way of playing through the game, giving the game not only a lot more replay value, but also an entertaining extra perspective that helps to emphasize the games' tongue-in-cheek humor, which is almost as large and important a component to their storytelling as the serious and dark aspects. I was really disappointed that Fallout 3 eliminated the option for a stupid character, but at least the upcoming Fallout: New Vegas is supposedly bringing it back--although I'm not sure, from reading about it in Game Informer, whether or not it will be in a significant capacity. Still, here's hoping.


















* Though not all of them--Risen's protagonist, while not lacking a personality, is fairly mild in general and doesn't seem to vary too much in how he acts regardless of what you choose his actions to be.