Despite having a long, RPG mumbo-jumbo type name, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is quite an impressive RPG from Namco, a very artistic work that comports itself with a dignity and style more like a Hayao Miyazaki film than a regular video game. It's like a...poignant, emotionally-driven artistic anime version of Fallout. While I don't find it as amazing as several people do, and it's certainly true that too much of the details and history of the plot are left unexplained or a little too open to interpretation, I do have to say that basically every part of it seems stylistically thoughtful and laden with emotional meaning, and every step of the gamer's journey through the moonlit ruins and haunts left by a gentle apocalypse is an enjoyable one, a significant one. This is a game that grips your hand tenderly as it tells its tale of emotion, and growth, of loneliness and friendship, and you're happy to hear the story.
Oh, except for this one part which is TOTAL FUCKING BULLSHIT.
By necessity, this rant now will contain spoilers for Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon. Big ones. So, if you haven't played the game, don't read this.* Go do something else, instead. Watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or read something by Mark Twain. He's better at witty writing than I am, anyway. A lot better.
Alright, so. What is bullshit about FDFRotM? I'll tell you what is bullshit about FDFRotM. What is bullshit about FDFRotM is the fate of Shin. That is 100% bullshit, and it sours the entire ending. And it pisses me off!
Alright, so, quick refresher--Shin is the main villain of FDFRotM. He is, or was in life (he's an artificial intelligence hologram-thing during the game--but since it's patterned exactly after his memories and personality, and planning to again activate the world-ending Glass Cage project, this version of Shin is as legitimate an antagonist entity as if he were the original), a scientist who achieved semi-psychic abilities to read the emotions and thoughts and whatnot of other people, by making himself the first test subject of his research to improve communication through empathy. After losing faith in humanity because of all he heard in the minds of people around him, Shin brought about (or helped bring about--if I recall correctly, it's not exactly stated that he was responsible for the negative effects of Glass Cage, but it's definitely implied that he had a huge hand in the whole fiasco) the quiet apocalypse of the Glass Cage project that left the world almost wholly without human beings. Shin gives up his quest to eliminate the last remnants of the human race at the end of the game when protagonist Seto combats him, and Seto's companion Sai, another ghost left behind from the old world, confesses that she had always secretly loved Shin. This, of course, shows Shin the error of his ways, he gives up on his plan and he and Sai fade away, happy and content thanks to their love for one another. How nice.
How very nice.
How very WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU, NAMCO?
I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Namco. Did I just see that right? Did you just give the GENOCIDAL MADMAN who killed over 6 BILLION PEOPLE a HAPPY ENDING? Maybe you missed the part in your own narrative where Shin brought about the END OF CURRENT HUMAN CULTURE. Maybe you forgot that he caused 6 billion people plus to go to sleep and never wake up again. Perhaps you have not quite considered that this fellow eliminated a PLANET'S worth of sapient organisms.
I'm sorry, but come on. Maybe I don't have enough perspective, but I feel like any individual who knowingly and maliciously participates in the extermination of an entire species, one numbering 6 thousand millions, does NOT deserve to get the girl and ride off into the fucking sunset! This is not a minor lapse in judgment. This is not a child's TV show where we're going to smile and encourage Shin because he realizes he made a mistake that was hurtful to others but has now learned his lesson. Big Bird, Lambchops, and Captain Kangaroo are not going to burst into a cute little song about why it's important not to do what Shin did so we all learn a happy little lesson. Twilight Sparkle is not going to dictate a letter that starts with, "Dear Princess Celestia, today I learned that it's not good to condemn everyone everywhere to death." This is a crime against humanity that makes every previous transgression committed, every war crime conceived, look like cute misdemeanors! If your story is going to involve a guy who expunged a sentient species from all existence, there had better be some serious consequences for him! Particularly if they're offset by the reward of a love interest!
And I mean APPROPRIATE consequences, here. Yeah, Shin does die, but look at the way he goes! Happy, content, satisfied! His notion that humanity sucks is proven wrong by a chick saying she digs him--but his mind is only comprehending the "I HAS GIRLFRIEND NOW" part. What it's NOT contemplating is, "Oh shit. I guess I condemned 99.9% of my species to death based on an assumption that was wrong." You do not see a single twitch of regretful conscience from the moment Sai proves him wrong to the moment he disappears in a golden, misleadingly divine light.
My God. Just...it's so unbelievable to me that Shin gets off virtually unpunished. A happy ending for the mass mass MASS murderer!
There are, of course, some extenuating details to this situation that make it even more stupid. Such as Shin's motivation. What was it that caused Shin to do this horrible thing? What unimaginable travesty was committed against him that could bring him to attempt to wipe out the human race? Twice? Get ready to shed some tears, guys: people weren't as nice as they should have been. When Shin became able to hear people's emotions and thoughts and such, he found out that what people think isn't always as nice and socially acceptable as what they say and act like. And so, because the people around him had petty negative thoughts in their heads, Shin decided that humanity was irredeemable and had to be eliminated, too petty to be allowed to live.
Because, y'know, finding out people aren't as nice as you want them to be isn't a petty reason to murder them, or anything.
I've seen versions of this idea a few times, and I have to say, every iteration I've seen has been better than Shin's experience. Take the show Torchwood. In Season 1, an alien chick gives one of the show's characters, Tosh, an artifact thingy that will let Tosh hear the thoughts of those around her. Upon bringing it to work, Tosh finds that her coworkers and friends speak and act nicely enough toward her, but think unpleasant things about her, criticizing her for her interests, her attempts to socialize with them, and even her style of dress. She's shocked and dismayed at finding out the secret vices and petty thoughts of the people around her, and it disorients her, makes her question herself, her place in Torchwood, and her beliefs.** Watching Tosh try to make the best of the situation, seeing her shocked loss of faith in people at knowing what they truly think, it all comes across as very believable. It's done well (one of the few parts of Season 1 that is, in fact). But you know what Tosh never gets around to feeling during her emotional turmoil? The desire to kill all humans. Somehow, her experiences, which for all appearances are extremely similar to Shin's, never cause her to question whether she should take an active part in destroying her species. You know why?
Because she's not a PSYCHOTIC IDIOT and the Torchwood writers were actually making an effort to create a character that could be taken seriously!
So not only is Shin homicidal on a species-wide scale, but he's that way for really stupid, selfish reasons. REALLY stupid ones, when you consider that he was a SCIENTIST who somehow thought that a specialized sample group of, say, 50 people could be trusted to be a completely accurate representation of a population of 6,000,000,000. So not only were his reasons for causing an apocalypse those of a whiny douchebag, but he didn't have any reasonable proof that these pitiful reasons were even ACCURATE.
Here's another thought to compound how stupid this scenario is. The reason Shin gives up on trying to kill everyone again is because he finds out from Sai's ghost that she always loved him. He apparently somehow didn't pick up on it. Um...how the hell could a mind-reader miss one of the most intense emotional and intellectual sensations one can feel happening in the patient he worked with every day? Particularly when the love was directed at him? This is either a disturbingly bad plot hole, or, if you want to make a stretch and fill in said hole with a quick bit of logic, it means that for whatever reason, Shin just wasn't able to hear love in people's minds, expressions, pheromones, whatever level the damn empathy power worked on. And if he couldn't hear love, who knows what other positive emotions he couldn't tune in on? No damn wonder he thought everyone around him was a jerk if he wasn't capable of hearing the parts of them that were at all decent. So not only did he murder for petty reasons, and not only were those reasons basically entirely unverified and impossible to determine whether they were actually accurate to the human race as a whole, but it's ALSO questionable now whether the experiences he had were even accurate of the handful of people he stupidly decided should be indicative of the whole human race.
We're supposed to feel any sort of sympathy for this guy? We're NOT supposed to be absolutely enraged that he finds peace and romantic fulfillment with no observable feeling of guilt?
And hey, regarding that romantic fulfillment, exactly why does Sai still love the guy, anyway? I mean, I can understand where her feelings came from during life. The game has her explain how they developed, and it's believable enough, if not particularly compelling. But honestly, I feel like Sai knowing that Shin deliberately killed everyone on Earth and is now trying to squash the few humans he missed the first time should maybe cool her passions a bit. Maybe I'm just crazy. Ladies, help me out. If you found out that the dude you'd been crushing on was the bringer of Armageddon, basically a more effective Hitler but who lacks even Hitler's (insanely misguided) wish to improve humanity, would you still have the hots for him? Or would whiny global genocide turn you off just a bit? I'd like to think that the latter would be true, and, by logical extension, I'd like to think that Sai's continued romantic interest in Shin is IDIOTIC.
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a great RPG, it really is. It's compelling, it's creative, it's artistic. Overall, I highly recommend it. Nonetheless, the circumstances of Shin's defeat and demise are stupid, nonsensical, and infuriating. It really feels like an instance where the writers just couldn't be bothered to consider the character and situation for very long and just threw in a few tired cliches to get it over with, cliches that they couldn't even execute well.
* This probably will leave this rant with no one to actually read it. Oh well.
** Why it would surprise Tosh at all that Owen is thinking mean things is anyone's guess. It's not like Owen goes out of his way during Season 1 to hide the fact that he's a complete and total asswipe.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Alundra 2's Reputation
Alundra 2 has, it can be debated, a bad reputation. I say it can be debated because it's generally more accurate to say that Alundra 2 has NO reputation, being a very obscure old RPG from the Playstation 1 days that got even less attention than its already oft-forgotten/ignored predecessor, Alundra 1, did. Generally speaking, no one but the big RPG enthusiast is going to even know what Alundra 2 is, should you ask.
The obscure-RPG-playing community, however, does have a general opinion of the game, from what I've seen, and that opinion is that it's just plain bad. Where Alundra 1 is generally praised in the gaming circles where its existence is known of, Alundra 2 receives, in those same circles, scorn and avoidance.
I think the main reason that people hold such disfavor for it is that it has nearly no ties, technical or thematic, to Alundra 1. It's not surprising that gamers would hold that against Alundra 2; after all, most of the people who would be interested in seeking out and playing Alundra 2 do so, I imagine, because they're fans of Alundra 1 and want more of the same. But Alundra 2 is just nothing like Alundra 1--no common characters or plot (there's no reason to think it even takes place on the same world), the gameplay style is notably different, as is the atmosphere and general look. About the only real connection they have is the title of the games and the fact that some of Alundra 2's music sounds like some of Alundra 1's. Alundra 1 is moody, Alundra 2 is lighthearted. Alundra 1 brings about surprising emotion, Alundra 2 goes for chuckles. Alundra 1 has subtle themes and a conflict between gods and men, Alundra 2 has a straightforward save the world adventure. Alundra 1 has frustratingly difficult puzzles, Alundra 2 has frustratingly difficult controls. Alundra 1 looks okay, Alundra 2 looks like something that was dug out of the garbage bins at Naughty Dog, Inc. while it was developing the first Crash Bandicoot. And so on.
Thing of it is...well, it's not warranted, this general dislike. Alundra 2 isn't a bad RPG. Oh, it's not an especially good one, either, I'll certainly grant you, and between the 2, Alundra 1 is clearly the superior RPG. Better ideas, better characters, better story, better execution overall. But Alundra 2 is, if not outright good, certainly a decent RPG, and enjoyable enough from start to finish that you shouldn't feel your time spent with it wasted.
What you have to realize, I think, is that this game, despite obviously trying to cash in on the meager fame of Alundra 1, knows what it is and does not try to be more. What it is, is a lighthearted adventure involving pirates, evil magic keys, dungeon-crawling, and world-saving. Alundra 2 doesn't really have any ambition to provide more than that, and if you expect it to do so (likely by expecting it to live up to Alundra 1's standards), it's natural that you'll be disappointed and dislike the game. This is, for once, a real case of a sequel that should be judged by its own standards and not by those of its predecessor.*
And by its own standards...Alundra 2's alright. In lieu of deep issues and emotional depth, Alundra 2 goes for a touch of the goofy, keeping itself amusing. You're never particularly invested in or worried for its characters, but they'll make you chuckle on occasion. The events you'll witness aren't exactly inspiring or particularly novel, but they're fun enough and even quite humorous at times. It's a casual RPG, but for being such, it does it well, I think, for it knows when to throw in a bit of humor, and often you'll be caught off-guard by it enough that any cynicism you have won't have caught up by the time you let out a guffaw. There was one scene in particular in the game that made me laugh out loud, the one that shows how the king has been replaced and in what way this illusion is maintained--it basically boils down to a wooden king doll sitting in the throne with a dude hiding just behind said throne, who, when needed, reaches around to lift the king's arm in a commanding way, or adjust his head. This bit of zany humor is portrayed with just the right timing and attitude that I found it to be uncommonly funny.
I also think it's worth noting that even as a name cash-in title, Alundra 2 really isn't as bad as all that. It sure as hell isn't the only RPG to transparently use a name to help sell it, and as far as that goes, I've seen much worse. Remember Grandia 3? That game had even less to do with the series it stole its name from, making it another obvious case of adopting a name for marketing purposes, and it flat out suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. Maybe Alundra 2 doesn't live up to its name and maybe they didn't try for too much more than a generic adventure with it, but at least it wasn't outright heinous, so it's still a step above its name cash-in peers.
The game sure as hell isn't without its flaws, of course. As I mentioned before, the control mechanics are pretty bad, and, though it doesn't matter much, it's quite strange that Alundra 2 would look so amazingly messy and ugly when Alundra 1 actually had a graphical presentation of good quality. The challenge factor of the puzzles is much less than Alundra 1's was, although that isn't necessarily a bad thing to some players (like myself), as Alundra 1's puzzles were sometimes way more difficult than they had any right to be. And hey, I wouldn't be me if I didn't frown on the game at least a little for not striving to do better with its story and characters. They may be amusing, but you can have a game that's both amusing AND has good characters and a meaningful plot--Disgaea 1 and Okage: Shadow King managed it, no problem.
Nonetheless, the overall package of Alundra 2 is fun enough, and though it's not very impressive, it at least knows this and doesn't try to convince you that it is, the way most uninspired RPGs will. And it does provide some good amusement all along its way. Alundra 2 isn't a great RPG, but I stand by the idea that it's at least a decent one, an enjoyable one, and I don't think it deserves the bad rep it has.
* I run into this argument fairly often, most notably concerning Chrono Cross, and every time someone has brought it up, it's annoyed the crap out of me. Because yes, Chrono Cross does suck enormously when compared to Chrono Trigger and as a sequel it's absolutely goddamn fucking awful. But if you don't compare it to CT, it STILL has an incomprehensible and outright stupid plot, a lousy and mostly superfluous cast, and so on. It is STILL absolutely goddamn fucking awful, taken alone or as a sequel. But its various defenders will, in a desperate move to at least appear like they have a legitimate stance, insist that anyone detracting from Chrono Cross MUST be doing so SOLELY because they're unfairly** judging it by the standards of Chrono Trigger. This tends to be the tactic of everyone I see use this argument when defending sequels. My point here is that Alundra 2 is, I think, one of those rare occasions where it actually is true that it's decent not by comparison but by its own merits.
** And why, might I ask, is it so unfair to compare a sequel to the original when it is clearly meant to tie in and build off of the original? It isn't like CC is detached from CT like Alundra 2 is to Alundra 1. They're connected by vital plot events, occur on the same world (more or less; that's always a gray area with time- and dimension-traveling stories), incorporate several of the same characters...obviously you should judge a game by its own worth, but when it derives a significant part of the qualities you're judging (plot and characters) from a predecessor, how it incorporates those aspects should be a consideration, too.
The obscure-RPG-playing community, however, does have a general opinion of the game, from what I've seen, and that opinion is that it's just plain bad. Where Alundra 1 is generally praised in the gaming circles where its existence is known of, Alundra 2 receives, in those same circles, scorn and avoidance.
I think the main reason that people hold such disfavor for it is that it has nearly no ties, technical or thematic, to Alundra 1. It's not surprising that gamers would hold that against Alundra 2; after all, most of the people who would be interested in seeking out and playing Alundra 2 do so, I imagine, because they're fans of Alundra 1 and want more of the same. But Alundra 2 is just nothing like Alundra 1--no common characters or plot (there's no reason to think it even takes place on the same world), the gameplay style is notably different, as is the atmosphere and general look. About the only real connection they have is the title of the games and the fact that some of Alundra 2's music sounds like some of Alundra 1's. Alundra 1 is moody, Alundra 2 is lighthearted. Alundra 1 brings about surprising emotion, Alundra 2 goes for chuckles. Alundra 1 has subtle themes and a conflict between gods and men, Alundra 2 has a straightforward save the world adventure. Alundra 1 has frustratingly difficult puzzles, Alundra 2 has frustratingly difficult controls. Alundra 1 looks okay, Alundra 2 looks like something that was dug out of the garbage bins at Naughty Dog, Inc. while it was developing the first Crash Bandicoot. And so on.
Thing of it is...well, it's not warranted, this general dislike. Alundra 2 isn't a bad RPG. Oh, it's not an especially good one, either, I'll certainly grant you, and between the 2, Alundra 1 is clearly the superior RPG. Better ideas, better characters, better story, better execution overall. But Alundra 2 is, if not outright good, certainly a decent RPG, and enjoyable enough from start to finish that you shouldn't feel your time spent with it wasted.
What you have to realize, I think, is that this game, despite obviously trying to cash in on the meager fame of Alundra 1, knows what it is and does not try to be more. What it is, is a lighthearted adventure involving pirates, evil magic keys, dungeon-crawling, and world-saving. Alundra 2 doesn't really have any ambition to provide more than that, and if you expect it to do so (likely by expecting it to live up to Alundra 1's standards), it's natural that you'll be disappointed and dislike the game. This is, for once, a real case of a sequel that should be judged by its own standards and not by those of its predecessor.*
And by its own standards...Alundra 2's alright. In lieu of deep issues and emotional depth, Alundra 2 goes for a touch of the goofy, keeping itself amusing. You're never particularly invested in or worried for its characters, but they'll make you chuckle on occasion. The events you'll witness aren't exactly inspiring or particularly novel, but they're fun enough and even quite humorous at times. It's a casual RPG, but for being such, it does it well, I think, for it knows when to throw in a bit of humor, and often you'll be caught off-guard by it enough that any cynicism you have won't have caught up by the time you let out a guffaw. There was one scene in particular in the game that made me laugh out loud, the one that shows how the king has been replaced and in what way this illusion is maintained--it basically boils down to a wooden king doll sitting in the throne with a dude hiding just behind said throne, who, when needed, reaches around to lift the king's arm in a commanding way, or adjust his head. This bit of zany humor is portrayed with just the right timing and attitude that I found it to be uncommonly funny.
I also think it's worth noting that even as a name cash-in title, Alundra 2 really isn't as bad as all that. It sure as hell isn't the only RPG to transparently use a name to help sell it, and as far as that goes, I've seen much worse. Remember Grandia 3? That game had even less to do with the series it stole its name from, making it another obvious case of adopting a name for marketing purposes, and it flat out suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. Maybe Alundra 2 doesn't live up to its name and maybe they didn't try for too much more than a generic adventure with it, but at least it wasn't outright heinous, so it's still a step above its name cash-in peers.
The game sure as hell isn't without its flaws, of course. As I mentioned before, the control mechanics are pretty bad, and, though it doesn't matter much, it's quite strange that Alundra 2 would look so amazingly messy and ugly when Alundra 1 actually had a graphical presentation of good quality. The challenge factor of the puzzles is much less than Alundra 1's was, although that isn't necessarily a bad thing to some players (like myself), as Alundra 1's puzzles were sometimes way more difficult than they had any right to be. And hey, I wouldn't be me if I didn't frown on the game at least a little for not striving to do better with its story and characters. They may be amusing, but you can have a game that's both amusing AND has good characters and a meaningful plot--Disgaea 1 and Okage: Shadow King managed it, no problem.
Nonetheless, the overall package of Alundra 2 is fun enough, and though it's not very impressive, it at least knows this and doesn't try to convince you that it is, the way most uninspired RPGs will. And it does provide some good amusement all along its way. Alundra 2 isn't a great RPG, but I stand by the idea that it's at least a decent one, an enjoyable one, and I don't think it deserves the bad rep it has.
* I run into this argument fairly often, most notably concerning Chrono Cross, and every time someone has brought it up, it's annoyed the crap out of me. Because yes, Chrono Cross does suck enormously when compared to Chrono Trigger and as a sequel it's absolutely goddamn fucking awful. But if you don't compare it to CT, it STILL has an incomprehensible and outright stupid plot, a lousy and mostly superfluous cast, and so on. It is STILL absolutely goddamn fucking awful, taken alone or as a sequel. But its various defenders will, in a desperate move to at least appear like they have a legitimate stance, insist that anyone detracting from Chrono Cross MUST be doing so SOLELY because they're unfairly** judging it by the standards of Chrono Trigger. This tends to be the tactic of everyone I see use this argument when defending sequels. My point here is that Alundra 2 is, I think, one of those rare occasions where it actually is true that it's decent not by comparison but by its own merits.
** And why, might I ask, is it so unfair to compare a sequel to the original when it is clearly meant to tie in and build off of the original? It isn't like CC is detached from CT like Alundra 2 is to Alundra 1. They're connected by vital plot events, occur on the same world (more or less; that's always a gray area with time- and dimension-traveling stories), incorporate several of the same characters...obviously you should judge a game by its own worth, but when it derives a significant part of the qualities you're judging (plot and characters) from a predecessor, how it incorporates those aspects should be a consideration, too.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
General RPGs' Minigames 9: Spheda
I really like how long a period can go by between rants on minigames. It means I haven't encountered any bad ones for a while...or at least, I haven't remembered them.
Sadly, something the other day recalled to my mind the Golf minigame of Dark Cloud 2. What a goddamn pain in the ass. I'm tempted to just end the rant right here; that assessment is really about the only thing you actually need or want to know about the minigame if you haven't already experienced it. But that'd be the easy way out, and I've never been one for...er, well, actually, I AM usually one for the easy way out, but let's just do this anyway.
So, Golf. Even as immensely boring as any sport is to watch or especially to simulate in a video game, Golf stands out for being boring. Watching some pretentious jerk stand still for several minutes so he can judge exactly how wind and distance and such affect a trajectory so he can swing a metal stick and hit a little ball across an over-sized lawn with no eye-catching landmarks or plant life just to see whether he can get said little ball into a little hole in the dirt is not my idea of a good time. Frankly, it leaves me wishing they were swinging the metal sticks at my head instead of the ball, just so I can see if my anesthetized mind is still capable of feeling pain. It doesn't even promote the development of any primitive skill that has a rudimentary usefulness--at least Soccer builds up your ability to kick a low moving object, which will be handy if you ever need to bring the hurt to a coworker's ankles, and Football promotes the ability to be body-slammed and not die, which is a very useful skill to have if you ever decide to commit suicide by having a bull ram into you but change your mind at the last second. What the hell does Golf teach you? Perhaps some day, when we finally declare war on the world's prairie dogs, our Golf players will become our greatest heroes, gloriously sending bombs into one underground bunker of our adorably chubby, godless mammal enemies after another. On that day, I shall eat my words.
Until then? Golf is rubbish.
So I'm not particularly predisposed to having to put up with it in my RPGs.* But even a fan of the game probably wouldn't like it in Dark Cloud 2. Because, you see, DC2 doesn't just give you Golf--it gives you Spheda, which I prefer to call Dungeon Golf. Dungeon Golf, a term of my own invention, is when you play Golf in a dungeon. It's a pretty self-explanatory term. You know what a regular Golf game requires? Among other things, a lot of open space. You know what a dungeon doesn't really provide? That.
The basic premise in DC2 is to get your stupid ball to roll, fly, and ricochet around the passages of the dungeon to get into a glowing alternate-dimension-portal-looking hole. To do this within the allowed number of swings, you need to send the damn ball bouncing all over the dungeon, avoiding or knocking against various barriers, objects, and walls. Regular Golf usually involves, if I'm not mistaken, a generally straight line to the goal--you may have to get over traps and hills, you may need to double back with the ball if you overshoot things, but there's never a maze-like set of corridors to navigate. This is almost closer to Pool than it is to Golf. So there's really no reason to think that even an enthusiast in this sport is going to enjoy the Dark Cloud 2 version.
This is further cemented by the inclusion of the one thing about Golf that is universally hated even among fans of it: the impediments and traps. If you like Golf but aren't a fan of getting your ball stuck in places it's hard to hit it out of, or losing the ball altogether by hitting it into the wrong spot, you are not going to like Spheda. The dungeons in which this minigame occurs often have bodies of water that must be avoided. Then there's the Mount Gundor dungeon, where you can and, I assure you, very often will accidentally knock the damn ball off the ledge and down the abyss. And there are parts of Ocean Roar Cave submerged in an inch or 2 of water where you will sculpt a monument to profanity as you attempt to get the ball where you want it to go through the flooded cavern, impeded at every stroke by the fucking water everywhere.
Now, any normal sadistic, hateful game developer might have stopped there. He's presumably alienated his target audience of RPG players (most of us aren't avid sports fans, I think). He's alienated anyone who actually likes Golf. Any normal spiteful developer would call it a day and move on. But not the madmen working at Level-5. No sir! They decided to compound the frustration and stupidity of Dungeon Golf with the color system. See, in Spheda, it's not enough just to hit the fucking ball into the fucking hole. No, you have to make sure the ball is also the opposite color of the portal thing--if it's red, the ball must be blue, and vice versa. How do you change the ball's color? By bouncing it off something. So of course, given the narrow and twisting confines of many areas of the game, and the fact that a swing of any decent power will at the very least cause the ball to bounce off the ground itself, it's more likely than not that you'll have no idea which color it will be by the end of every swing, and by extension, by the time it gets within sight of the distortion you need to hit it into. You can--and by "can," I mean "very often will, with curses spoken loudly and teeth gnashed mightily"--find yourself lined up for a clear shot into the damn goal with 1 swing left, and find the ball sporting the shade you don't want. Maybe you'll have a wall you can ricochet off of into the goal to change the ball to the needed hue--and maybe you won't, and will have to do the whole thing over again.
Which brings me to the next "fun" part of this minigame--trying the level over again. When you fail to beat a stage in Spheda, which is going to be the majority of the time, you don't just get to try it again. That would only be a little annoying. No, to try again, you'll have to re-enter that level of the dungeon and beat all the enemies in it all over again. Because, y'know, there aren't enough repetitive fights against generic enemies in an RPG already, right? So in addition to setting you back 5 or 10 minutes for the Spheda game, any subsequent attempt after an initial failure is going to run you a good 10 - 20 minutes extra. This minigame, more than most others, was obviously designed with the belief that the player is immortal and thus places no particular worth on his or her time.**
The one thing I can't fault Spheda on too much, I suppose, is the fact that there's not much actual need to play it. The rewards for it are nice enough, but not especially important--each successful round of Dungeon Golf rewards you with some good, but not necessary, items, and a medal. Medals can be exchanged for new outfits that change the main characters' appearance, or for an item that lets you rename weapons. So overall, you're not going to be penalized by missing out on something significant if you don't indulge in your self-loathing and play Spheda. And the only time the game forces you to play it barely counts, because if you can't manage to win that mandatory round, the game just has one of the characters do it for you. So in the end, Spheda is at least not compulsory.
But stupid? Frustrating? Pointless? Unwanted? A terrible idea that demands a kick in the face be delivered to anyone and everyone involved in its creation? Oh hell yes.
* Hell, I'm not sure we should have to put up with it even in our Golf games. Seems to me that you could sneak an entirely different game into a Golf title without upsetting too many people. Is someone really going to complain that you tricked them into actually playing something fun?
** Of course, I did play Phantasy Star 3 from beginning to end, so I guess I shouldn't put on too many airs about valuing my own time too heavily.
Sadly, something the other day recalled to my mind the Golf minigame of Dark Cloud 2. What a goddamn pain in the ass. I'm tempted to just end the rant right here; that assessment is really about the only thing you actually need or want to know about the minigame if you haven't already experienced it. But that'd be the easy way out, and I've never been one for...er, well, actually, I AM usually one for the easy way out, but let's just do this anyway.
So, Golf. Even as immensely boring as any sport is to watch or especially to simulate in a video game, Golf stands out for being boring. Watching some pretentious jerk stand still for several minutes so he can judge exactly how wind and distance and such affect a trajectory so he can swing a metal stick and hit a little ball across an over-sized lawn with no eye-catching landmarks or plant life just to see whether he can get said little ball into a little hole in the dirt is not my idea of a good time. Frankly, it leaves me wishing they were swinging the metal sticks at my head instead of the ball, just so I can see if my anesthetized mind is still capable of feeling pain. It doesn't even promote the development of any primitive skill that has a rudimentary usefulness--at least Soccer builds up your ability to kick a low moving object, which will be handy if you ever need to bring the hurt to a coworker's ankles, and Football promotes the ability to be body-slammed and not die, which is a very useful skill to have if you ever decide to commit suicide by having a bull ram into you but change your mind at the last second. What the hell does Golf teach you? Perhaps some day, when we finally declare war on the world's prairie dogs, our Golf players will become our greatest heroes, gloriously sending bombs into one underground bunker of our adorably chubby, godless mammal enemies after another. On that day, I shall eat my words.
Until then? Golf is rubbish.
So I'm not particularly predisposed to having to put up with it in my RPGs.* But even a fan of the game probably wouldn't like it in Dark Cloud 2. Because, you see, DC2 doesn't just give you Golf--it gives you Spheda, which I prefer to call Dungeon Golf. Dungeon Golf, a term of my own invention, is when you play Golf in a dungeon. It's a pretty self-explanatory term. You know what a regular Golf game requires? Among other things, a lot of open space. You know what a dungeon doesn't really provide? That.
The basic premise in DC2 is to get your stupid ball to roll, fly, and ricochet around the passages of the dungeon to get into a glowing alternate-dimension-portal-looking hole. To do this within the allowed number of swings, you need to send the damn ball bouncing all over the dungeon, avoiding or knocking against various barriers, objects, and walls. Regular Golf usually involves, if I'm not mistaken, a generally straight line to the goal--you may have to get over traps and hills, you may need to double back with the ball if you overshoot things, but there's never a maze-like set of corridors to navigate. This is almost closer to Pool than it is to Golf. So there's really no reason to think that even an enthusiast in this sport is going to enjoy the Dark Cloud 2 version.
This is further cemented by the inclusion of the one thing about Golf that is universally hated even among fans of it: the impediments and traps. If you like Golf but aren't a fan of getting your ball stuck in places it's hard to hit it out of, or losing the ball altogether by hitting it into the wrong spot, you are not going to like Spheda. The dungeons in which this minigame occurs often have bodies of water that must be avoided. Then there's the Mount Gundor dungeon, where you can and, I assure you, very often will accidentally knock the damn ball off the ledge and down the abyss. And there are parts of Ocean Roar Cave submerged in an inch or 2 of water where you will sculpt a monument to profanity as you attempt to get the ball where you want it to go through the flooded cavern, impeded at every stroke by the fucking water everywhere.
Now, any normal sadistic, hateful game developer might have stopped there. He's presumably alienated his target audience of RPG players (most of us aren't avid sports fans, I think). He's alienated anyone who actually likes Golf. Any normal spiteful developer would call it a day and move on. But not the madmen working at Level-5. No sir! They decided to compound the frustration and stupidity of Dungeon Golf with the color system. See, in Spheda, it's not enough just to hit the fucking ball into the fucking hole. No, you have to make sure the ball is also the opposite color of the portal thing--if it's red, the ball must be blue, and vice versa. How do you change the ball's color? By bouncing it off something. So of course, given the narrow and twisting confines of many areas of the game, and the fact that a swing of any decent power will at the very least cause the ball to bounce off the ground itself, it's more likely than not that you'll have no idea which color it will be by the end of every swing, and by extension, by the time it gets within sight of the distortion you need to hit it into. You can--and by "can," I mean "very often will, with curses spoken loudly and teeth gnashed mightily"--find yourself lined up for a clear shot into the damn goal with 1 swing left, and find the ball sporting the shade you don't want. Maybe you'll have a wall you can ricochet off of into the goal to change the ball to the needed hue--and maybe you won't, and will have to do the whole thing over again.
Which brings me to the next "fun" part of this minigame--trying the level over again. When you fail to beat a stage in Spheda, which is going to be the majority of the time, you don't just get to try it again. That would only be a little annoying. No, to try again, you'll have to re-enter that level of the dungeon and beat all the enemies in it all over again. Because, y'know, there aren't enough repetitive fights against generic enemies in an RPG already, right? So in addition to setting you back 5 or 10 minutes for the Spheda game, any subsequent attempt after an initial failure is going to run you a good 10 - 20 minutes extra. This minigame, more than most others, was obviously designed with the belief that the player is immortal and thus places no particular worth on his or her time.**
The one thing I can't fault Spheda on too much, I suppose, is the fact that there's not much actual need to play it. The rewards for it are nice enough, but not especially important--each successful round of Dungeon Golf rewards you with some good, but not necessary, items, and a medal. Medals can be exchanged for new outfits that change the main characters' appearance, or for an item that lets you rename weapons. So overall, you're not going to be penalized by missing out on something significant if you don't indulge in your self-loathing and play Spheda. And the only time the game forces you to play it barely counts, because if you can't manage to win that mandatory round, the game just has one of the characters do it for you. So in the end, Spheda is at least not compulsory.
But stupid? Frustrating? Pointless? Unwanted? A terrible idea that demands a kick in the face be delivered to anyone and everyone involved in its creation? Oh hell yes.
* Hell, I'm not sure we should have to put up with it even in our Golf games. Seems to me that you could sneak an entirely different game into a Golf title without upsetting too many people. Is someone really going to complain that you tricked them into actually playing something fun?
** Of course, I did play Phantasy Star 3 from beginning to end, so I guess I shouldn't put on too many airs about valuing my own time too heavily.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Fallout: New Vegas's Downloadable Content
So far, I've had a mixed bag with RPG add-ons. Fallout 3's were generally very good, while Dragon Age 1's were generally lousy. Mass Effect 1's were split evenly between decent and dull. Mass Effect 2's tended to lean towards quality, while Dragon Age 2's add-ons, from what I have seen so far, have leaned away from it. So, let's see how Fallout: New Vegas measures up. While I liked FNV, and recognize much of its storytelling worth for its use of themes of Americana, I feel it didn't have as powerful a draw nor as compelling an overall tale as Fallout 3 did, so I'm not expecting anything too great. Still, FNV did have some excellent moments, so I do have a little hope for something decent.
Dead Money: At first, I was pretty skeptical of how worthwhile this DLC was going to be. Breaking into an old-world casino for a heist of a speculative treasure while under the watchful eye of a crazy, greedy jackass who could kill you at any time, by working with an untrustworthy team of individuals that are probably waiting for the first opportunity to stab you in the back...well, you take the words "old-world" out of that description, and you've basically just described Reindeer Games. So I went into this DLC expecting a story of comparable silly, pointless stupidity.
This DLC is pleasantly surprising, though. Oh, at first it doesn't seem like much, just a romp around a suburban ghost town finding stuff and doing errands, basic Fallout stuff, with a couple extra gameplay twists to keep things mildly frustrating. From a gameplay perspective, I suppose it's alright...one COULD take the extra variables of toxic clouds, regenerating enemies, confusing street layouts, hologram guards, and deadly radio beeps as a positive thing, ways to make the playing more complex. And as long as you're being thorough with your explorations (and why wouldn't you be? It's a Fallout game; scrounging for stuff is half the fun), it'll last you a good while.
As it goes along, though, one finds that the history of the casino that one is breaking into is actually pretty interesting, with simple yet compelling human drama reminiscent of famous American story tropes laced into its background. About half of the characters in Dead Money are pretty decent, too--Christine and Father Elijah aren't noteworthy, but Dean's history is good, and Dog/God's character is quite good and well-executed. The DLC's story as a whole also comes together pretty nicely, showing through the history of the Sierra Madre Casino's creator, his paramour, the antagonist, the party members, and even the gameplay itself at the end (the fact that you won't be able to make it out if you try to leave with all the gold in the vault)*, greed's many forms, that it can lead you to doom, and that sometimes the only right thing to do, for your sake and others, is to let go of what you desire, walk away from it and find a new focus. It takes a little while to get going, but once it does, this DLC's plot has the heart and the skill to make it a solid side story. $10 is a bit steep for most DLCs, but given the quality of the story of Dead Money, and how long it will take (I'd say 6 to 8 hours, if you're exploring thoroughly), it's worth it.
Honest Hearts: After Dead Money's unexpected subtle quality, Honest Hearts is kind of disappointing. The overall story to it, that of saving a peaceful tribe from the aggressions of another tribe in league with Caesar's Legion, is just not terribly interesting, just a by-the-numbers progression of quests that don't feel particularly meaningful.
The characters involved in this Downloadable Content are a huge step down from the previous one's, too. In Dead Money, we had a decent character (Christine), a decent character whose past tied interestingly into the setting and story of the add-on (Dean), a really interesting and well-done character (Dog/God), and a villain who, if not particularly interesting, at least symbolized well the underlying theme of the add-on. This DLC has no one of comparison for its major entities--Daniel, Follows-Chalk, and Waking Cloud are all highly forgettable and have little worthwhile depth, and Joshua, while okay, is not nearly as well-characterized as he should be. All of his dialogue and history is far too understated; you've got a very religious man who fell from his faith to become the legendarily successful right hand general of a tyrannical warlord, was betrayed by the warlord for failing just once, and finally reawakened to his faith and devoted himself to the salvation of others. How the hell do you make a character like that dull? Well, they managed it somehow. And lastly, there's Salt-Upon-Wounds, the villain of the add-on, who only shows up at the very end, has no character development whatsoever, and is completely forgettable.
There are some Biblical references and undertones to the setting, events, and characters of this DLC, but where the theme of Greed was subtle yet thoughtful and significant in Dead Money, here the Christian theme just seems insubstantial at most points, and clumsily pasted on at others.
Honest Hearts isn't all bad--the setting and its exploration are fairly nice, though not noteworthy, and the journal of the individual known as The Father, whose entries you can find throughout the DLC's area, is actually pretty interesting. But overall, it's fairly substandard, and definitely not worth even half the admission price.
Old World Blues: If you read my Fallout 3 DLC rant, you may remember that I was definitely not impressed with the Mothership Zeta add-on. They were apparently going for something lighthearted with it, but all it wound up being was boring, pointless, and moderately stupid. So I wasn't expecting much from Fallout: New Vegas's successor to that, Old World Blues, billed as another lighthearted DLC. But since Fallout 3, someone must have realized that "light" does not mean "lazy and without meaning," because Old World Blues is actually pretty damned funny overall. The dialogue with the Think Tank, along with Dr. Mobius, is generally clever, and consistently amusing, and I nearly bust a gut laughing at some of the personalities in the Sink area of this add-on--Muggy is one of the best things to happen, ever. The DLC also ties itself nicely to the previous Dead Money add-on, and to the upcoming final package, Lonesome Road--the ties are significant, but not overbearing, and all the hooplah about "The Big Empty" (the setting for this DLC) that Dead Money made is surprisingly effectively executed here. The way this DLC's setting had been built up, I figured any actual representation of it wouldn't be able to quite live up to the hype and mental image I had of it, so the developers' turning the whole thing into a joke reminiscent of classic mid-century B-rated science fiction was really quite ingenious, and didn't leave me feeling let down at all.
It's quite good gameplay-wise, too. This DLC's new weapons aren't that interesting, I guess, but it offers a new armor that's very handy, the difficulty's very high for all the people (not me) who wanted a challenge for their endgame levels, the DLC introduces a handy use for several until now useless background items which means more fun, rewarding exploratory looting, and most handily, this add-on provides an immediately accessible, fully-equipped home base location for the player. Up until now, there really wasn't a good one available--the only one with all the proper amenities for a home base in this game was located in a place that, idiotically enough, could not be fast-traveled to. Even when you were at the location for it, you still had to go inside and board an elevator to get to the home base location, adding to the inconvenience. All the other, smaller home bases lacked one resource or the other, and sometimes were kinda cramped. Of course, I have to say that a proper home base should have already been in the game, instead of added in this late, but eh, I guess it's just good that it's there.
The one thing I think didn't really work for this package was just the fact that it tries, towards its end, to become a little too serious. While the revelations that Dr. Mobius has to offer near the DLC's end are interesting, and even perhaps a little moving, everything after that point starts to feel like they tried to cram serious plot significance in at the last minute. It's just not the direction the whole thing was going in, and it's out of place. This one problem aside, though, Old World Blues is a solid, fun Downloadable Content, and I can't imagine anyone coming away from it feeling unsatisfied with their purchase.
Lonesome Road: And finally we come to Lonesome Road, the last Fallout: New Vegas DLC, the one that the previous 3 add-ons, not to mention many references in the game proper, have led up to. How does it hold up? Well...I was surprised to find that this really IS about as cool and epic as the build-up would have you believe. I'll grant you that there are quite a few details that could have been expounded on in more depth, questions about the DLC's antagonist Ulysses that were kind of just passed by during Lonesome Road's narrative, but overall, this side-story of the power of symbols and history does not disappoint, introducing not only a slew of philosophical angles to the conflict between NCR, Caesar's Legion, and Mr. House (and all eloquently spoken by Ulysses), but also providing some much-needed history for Fallout: New Vegas's protagonist. As a bonus, we get some character development for one of the game's party members, ED-E, which was sorely needed. Another, minor bonus is that the characterization of Ulysses through his recordings also better ties his journeys to the Honest Hearts DLC, making it seem, in retrospect, more relevant to the add-ons in general, and more important to Fallout: New Vegas's themes and events. I also appreciate the pace and execution of the story's telling to this DLC; while there's still a component of exploration to Lonesome Road, it is, generally speaking, a very linear side adventure, and there's a finite number of enemies until the DLC's end. This lessened potential for exploration and limited potential for fighting means that there's less potential for distraction from the plot and its narrative. This is a good and appropriate conclusion to Fallout: New Vegas's add-ons, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
So in the end, how did Fallout: New Vegas do with its add-ons? Pretty well, really. While each of these DLCs are a pricy $10, as long as you're going everywhere and doing everything there is to do in them, you're probably going to spend around 7 to 10 hours on each, (you can definitely do each of them faster than that, but if you're just going to rush through each area and forgo half the content and experience, then you're obviously not concerned about getting your money's worth anyway), which brings it to a rate of somewhere around a buck to a buck and a half per hour of gameplay. That's a pretty decent ratio for add-ons (certainly better than others I've dealt with--like paying a new game's price for the Dragon Age 1 Awakening expansion and getting less than half as many hours of gameplay as dollars spent on it), and 3 out of the 4 have worthwhile stories to tell and are quite enjoyable. 1 has interesting takes on a theme of human nature, one has interesting takes on a theme of human society, and one's just really funny. And even the odd one out, Honest Hearts, isn't bad, just somewhat bland, which still makes it an improvement over the worst of the Fallout 3 add-ons, Mothership Zeta, which was bland AND stupid. So Fallout: New Vegas passes with high marks for its Downloadable Content, certainly on equal ground with its predecessor, Fallout 3.
Too bad I have a feeling the next game I'll be doing one of these add-on rants for, Dragon Age 2, isn't going to be quite as satisfying...
* At least, you're not SUPPOSED to be able to. There are a couple of creative little work-around methods for getting out successfully with all the gold, which are helpfully described in several Youtube videos. But the point is that the creators obviously intended The Courier (Fallout: New Vegas's protagonist) to have to give up on most of the treasure to be able to escape the casino alive.
Dead Money: At first, I was pretty skeptical of how worthwhile this DLC was going to be. Breaking into an old-world casino for a heist of a speculative treasure while under the watchful eye of a crazy, greedy jackass who could kill you at any time, by working with an untrustworthy team of individuals that are probably waiting for the first opportunity to stab you in the back...well, you take the words "old-world" out of that description, and you've basically just described Reindeer Games. So I went into this DLC expecting a story of comparable silly, pointless stupidity.
This DLC is pleasantly surprising, though. Oh, at first it doesn't seem like much, just a romp around a suburban ghost town finding stuff and doing errands, basic Fallout stuff, with a couple extra gameplay twists to keep things mildly frustrating. From a gameplay perspective, I suppose it's alright...one COULD take the extra variables of toxic clouds, regenerating enemies, confusing street layouts, hologram guards, and deadly radio beeps as a positive thing, ways to make the playing more complex. And as long as you're being thorough with your explorations (and why wouldn't you be? It's a Fallout game; scrounging for stuff is half the fun), it'll last you a good while.
As it goes along, though, one finds that the history of the casino that one is breaking into is actually pretty interesting, with simple yet compelling human drama reminiscent of famous American story tropes laced into its background. About half of the characters in Dead Money are pretty decent, too--Christine and Father Elijah aren't noteworthy, but Dean's history is good, and Dog/God's character is quite good and well-executed. The DLC's story as a whole also comes together pretty nicely, showing through the history of the Sierra Madre Casino's creator, his paramour, the antagonist, the party members, and even the gameplay itself at the end (the fact that you won't be able to make it out if you try to leave with all the gold in the vault)*, greed's many forms, that it can lead you to doom, and that sometimes the only right thing to do, for your sake and others, is to let go of what you desire, walk away from it and find a new focus. It takes a little while to get going, but once it does, this DLC's plot has the heart and the skill to make it a solid side story. $10 is a bit steep for most DLCs, but given the quality of the story of Dead Money, and how long it will take (I'd say 6 to 8 hours, if you're exploring thoroughly), it's worth it.
Honest Hearts: After Dead Money's unexpected subtle quality, Honest Hearts is kind of disappointing. The overall story to it, that of saving a peaceful tribe from the aggressions of another tribe in league with Caesar's Legion, is just not terribly interesting, just a by-the-numbers progression of quests that don't feel particularly meaningful.
The characters involved in this Downloadable Content are a huge step down from the previous one's, too. In Dead Money, we had a decent character (Christine), a decent character whose past tied interestingly into the setting and story of the add-on (Dean), a really interesting and well-done character (Dog/God), and a villain who, if not particularly interesting, at least symbolized well the underlying theme of the add-on. This DLC has no one of comparison for its major entities--Daniel, Follows-Chalk, and Waking Cloud are all highly forgettable and have little worthwhile depth, and Joshua, while okay, is not nearly as well-characterized as he should be. All of his dialogue and history is far too understated; you've got a very religious man who fell from his faith to become the legendarily successful right hand general of a tyrannical warlord, was betrayed by the warlord for failing just once, and finally reawakened to his faith and devoted himself to the salvation of others. How the hell do you make a character like that dull? Well, they managed it somehow. And lastly, there's Salt-Upon-Wounds, the villain of the add-on, who only shows up at the very end, has no character development whatsoever, and is completely forgettable.
There are some Biblical references and undertones to the setting, events, and characters of this DLC, but where the theme of Greed was subtle yet thoughtful and significant in Dead Money, here the Christian theme just seems insubstantial at most points, and clumsily pasted on at others.
Honest Hearts isn't all bad--the setting and its exploration are fairly nice, though not noteworthy, and the journal of the individual known as The Father, whose entries you can find throughout the DLC's area, is actually pretty interesting. But overall, it's fairly substandard, and definitely not worth even half the admission price.
Old World Blues: If you read my Fallout 3 DLC rant, you may remember that I was definitely not impressed with the Mothership Zeta add-on. They were apparently going for something lighthearted with it, but all it wound up being was boring, pointless, and moderately stupid. So I wasn't expecting much from Fallout: New Vegas's successor to that, Old World Blues, billed as another lighthearted DLC. But since Fallout 3, someone must have realized that "light" does not mean "lazy and without meaning," because Old World Blues is actually pretty damned funny overall. The dialogue with the Think Tank, along with Dr. Mobius, is generally clever, and consistently amusing, and I nearly bust a gut laughing at some of the personalities in the Sink area of this add-on--Muggy is one of the best things to happen, ever. The DLC also ties itself nicely to the previous Dead Money add-on, and to the upcoming final package, Lonesome Road--the ties are significant, but not overbearing, and all the hooplah about "The Big Empty" (the setting for this DLC) that Dead Money made is surprisingly effectively executed here. The way this DLC's setting had been built up, I figured any actual representation of it wouldn't be able to quite live up to the hype and mental image I had of it, so the developers' turning the whole thing into a joke reminiscent of classic mid-century B-rated science fiction was really quite ingenious, and didn't leave me feeling let down at all.
It's quite good gameplay-wise, too. This DLC's new weapons aren't that interesting, I guess, but it offers a new armor that's very handy, the difficulty's very high for all the people (not me) who wanted a challenge for their endgame levels, the DLC introduces a handy use for several until now useless background items which means more fun, rewarding exploratory looting, and most handily, this add-on provides an immediately accessible, fully-equipped home base location for the player. Up until now, there really wasn't a good one available--the only one with all the proper amenities for a home base in this game was located in a place that, idiotically enough, could not be fast-traveled to. Even when you were at the location for it, you still had to go inside and board an elevator to get to the home base location, adding to the inconvenience. All the other, smaller home bases lacked one resource or the other, and sometimes were kinda cramped. Of course, I have to say that a proper home base should have already been in the game, instead of added in this late, but eh, I guess it's just good that it's there.
The one thing I think didn't really work for this package was just the fact that it tries, towards its end, to become a little too serious. While the revelations that Dr. Mobius has to offer near the DLC's end are interesting, and even perhaps a little moving, everything after that point starts to feel like they tried to cram serious plot significance in at the last minute. It's just not the direction the whole thing was going in, and it's out of place. This one problem aside, though, Old World Blues is a solid, fun Downloadable Content, and I can't imagine anyone coming away from it feeling unsatisfied with their purchase.
Lonesome Road: And finally we come to Lonesome Road, the last Fallout: New Vegas DLC, the one that the previous 3 add-ons, not to mention many references in the game proper, have led up to. How does it hold up? Well...I was surprised to find that this really IS about as cool and epic as the build-up would have you believe. I'll grant you that there are quite a few details that could have been expounded on in more depth, questions about the DLC's antagonist Ulysses that were kind of just passed by during Lonesome Road's narrative, but overall, this side-story of the power of symbols and history does not disappoint, introducing not only a slew of philosophical angles to the conflict between NCR, Caesar's Legion, and Mr. House (and all eloquently spoken by Ulysses), but also providing some much-needed history for Fallout: New Vegas's protagonist. As a bonus, we get some character development for one of the game's party members, ED-E, which was sorely needed. Another, minor bonus is that the characterization of Ulysses through his recordings also better ties his journeys to the Honest Hearts DLC, making it seem, in retrospect, more relevant to the add-ons in general, and more important to Fallout: New Vegas's themes and events. I also appreciate the pace and execution of the story's telling to this DLC; while there's still a component of exploration to Lonesome Road, it is, generally speaking, a very linear side adventure, and there's a finite number of enemies until the DLC's end. This lessened potential for exploration and limited potential for fighting means that there's less potential for distraction from the plot and its narrative. This is a good and appropriate conclusion to Fallout: New Vegas's add-ons, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
So in the end, how did Fallout: New Vegas do with its add-ons? Pretty well, really. While each of these DLCs are a pricy $10, as long as you're going everywhere and doing everything there is to do in them, you're probably going to spend around 7 to 10 hours on each, (you can definitely do each of them faster than that, but if you're just going to rush through each area and forgo half the content and experience, then you're obviously not concerned about getting your money's worth anyway), which brings it to a rate of somewhere around a buck to a buck and a half per hour of gameplay. That's a pretty decent ratio for add-ons (certainly better than others I've dealt with--like paying a new game's price for the Dragon Age 1 Awakening expansion and getting less than half as many hours of gameplay as dollars spent on it), and 3 out of the 4 have worthwhile stories to tell and are quite enjoyable. 1 has interesting takes on a theme of human nature, one has interesting takes on a theme of human society, and one's just really funny. And even the odd one out, Honest Hearts, isn't bad, just somewhat bland, which still makes it an improvement over the worst of the Fallout 3 add-ons, Mothership Zeta, which was bland AND stupid. So Fallout: New Vegas passes with high marks for its Downloadable Content, certainly on equal ground with its predecessor, Fallout 3.
Too bad I have a feeling the next game I'll be doing one of these add-on rants for, Dragon Age 2, isn't going to be quite as satisfying...
* At least, you're not SUPPOSED to be able to. There are a couple of creative little work-around methods for getting out successfully with all the gold, which are helpfully described in several Youtube videos. But the point is that the creators obviously intended The Courier (Fallout: New Vegas's protagonist) to have to give up on most of the treasure to be able to escape the casino alive.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Final Fantasy 9's Strategy Guide
Back in the day, printed strategy guides used to be a pretty standard game accessory. You bought the game, you played it, and if you just couldn't get past a certain part and didn't have any friends to ask how to get through it (or if you just couldn't be bothered to try), you went out and bought the strategy guide. This was back in the days of the SNES and Sega Genesis.
The internet changed this. Dramatically. By the time the Playstation 1 was in full swing, "teh intarwebz," to use its scientific title, was filling with walkthroughs, FAQs, and random tips and tricks dispersed on forums. At present, there are multiple locations a mere few clicks away for any given game out there that can pretty easily tell you everything you want to know about that game. Hell, you can often find a complete walkthrough available on GameFAQs for games that haven't even come out yet, because people will write them based on the original Japanese version released months before the US gets it. Even in extreme circumstances where some aspect of the game hasn't been addressed in an official walkthrough, you have quick and easy access to other people via forums, chat programs, and God knows what else--you're never in a position where you can't find a friend who can help you with a certain part of a game.
I know there are still physical walkthroughs sold nowadays, and God bless whoever's still doing it, because I have no idea how they stay in business. I guess they must really go all out on aesthetic appeal and target games that are complex enough that they can make the whole walkthrough look impressively huge to tempt buyers--I know I saw a Final Fantasy 13 one recently that was thicker than some college textbooks. But I'm pretty certain that the business must be a lot smaller than it was, and is likely to keep dwindling.
Now, back in late 2000, the fan-made walkthrough process was not quite as streamlined as it is now. But if it's in its fully-formed adult life now, it was at least in its competent teen years then. If you needed to know specific game information about pretty much any title, particularly one as popular as, say, Final Fantasy, you could find effective information quickly and easily. There were really only 3 reasons for a person to get a walkthrough for a popular video game. They were:
1. No reliable internet access. Hey, a lot of people still weren't really online at that point. Hell, there are still a fair amount of people in the present who aren't.
2. The aesthetic and/or collector value. Some people just LIKE to look at a page more than a computer screen when they read something. In many cases, I'm one of them (though not in this one; to me a walkthrough is a walkthrough, electronic or paper). They just wanted to get their answers from a physical guide.
3. They happened to walk into a game store on the day that the store was getting rid of its old walkthroughs that weren't selling, and were offered the pretty good deal of 7 game walkthroughs for 1 cent.
That 3rd one there was considerably less common than the beginning 2 reasons, though; I can only really confirm it having happened once. But anyway, the major reasons I can think of, in 2000 AD, to buy a physical strategy guide revolved around lack of internet and preference for paper. Remember this.
So, enough introduction paragraphs. Let's actually try talking about the subject of the rant. For every major Final Fantasy game that comes out for over a decade, there has been an Official Strategy Guide released for it. In 2000, it was Final Fantasy 9's turn, and Brady Games was the one to release the official game guide for it. At first glance, it seems good enough...decent-looking cover, thick enough that it's probably pretty comprehensive, promises that it's the official strategy guide on the front, which must mean that it has everything inside you could possibly need to know about the game. Right?
Alright, so we go along...acknowledgement page, table of contents...hm, what's this? 3rd page in, there's the introduction, and then a section entitled "Using This Book." A quick glance will tell the reader that the "key element" in this strategy guide is its ties with PlayOnline, a website in which you type a keyword, as indicated by the book, and get detailed information about that part of the game, be it an item, location, boss, or something else. The next page gives a visual representation of what the PlayOnline keyword boxes in the guide will look like.
Uh...okay...
Moving on, the next pages cover the basics of gameplay, expanding with superfluous jabber and charts into a half dozen pages what a tiny instruction manual managed to adequately explain already. But oh well, not important.
Ah-ha! Having done with basic information, it's time to get on with the specific info! Here come the character pages! Time to learn about the characters of the ga--wait, what? What is this?
Since you are (probably) not looking at the guide yourself, allow me to describe what I see here. The page starts with the main character, Zidane. There is a brief explanation of who he is and what kind of stuff he equips. There is then a section called "Stealing Items," which very lightly touches upon Zidane's ability to steal from enemies, and...that's it. Where's the information about his other abilities? He's got quite a few. They just mention in passing that he has other ones. But what are they? They don't list any of--oh, wait. The blue PlayOnline box on the side is saying something. It's saying that if you want to know anything substantial about what Zidane, the character you'll be using almost from start to finish in this game, can do in combat, you'll have to go to the PlayOnline site to find out. Yes, the guide whose purpose for existence is to help you to play the game effectively will not tell you of the capabilities of the character you'll be using.
Oh, no, wait. Characters, plural. ALL of the characters' pages have PlayOnline password boxes where the actual information on their skills should have been. In some cases, there are multiple instances of PlayOnline boxes withholding essential data for a single character.
Now, if you continue onwards, you'll find some pages about the abilities for each character, which DOES list out what abilities the character can learn, and what they do. But still the PlayOnline boxes are holding hostage any detailed information about these abilities, such as, for example, their power, the amount of MP they use, how/where to learn them and how much time is required for the learning process, and so on. If you want detailed information, or, to quote the guide, "a complete list of each character's abilities," you have to put the guide book down and go online for it.
It pretty much just goes downhill from this point. No matter what information you're looking to obtain from this guide, you'll only find, at most, half the story in its pages, with all the details having been kidnapped by the infernal PlayOnline blue boxes. Desire detailed locations for the game's weapons? Gotta look online. Want to know what characters learn from Accessories? Also online. Have an interest, for some unfathomable reason, to better understand the Tetra Master card minigame? Every goddamn aspect they list has had some of its information relocated to PlayOnline.
And things get REAL bad when they start the actual walkthrough itself. Want the guide to give you any information about where to upgrade your party's equipment when you reach a new town? Go to PlayOnline. Want to know where special hidden items are located in any given dungeon/town/whatever? Go to PlayOnline. Want to know anything at all about the Frog Catching and Chocobo Digging sidequests? From what I can see, you have to go to PlayOnline for any knowledge of them beyond their names. Want to know what rewards you could get from the Stellazio Coin sidequest? Go to PlayOnline. Need any strategy for dealing with a boss that's more complex than "Use strongest spells with mage, heal with healer, and steal with thief?" Go to PlayOnline.
Basically, if you want to know anything about this game more complicated than what general direction to have your character walk in next, there's a 50-50 chance that the guide's gonna tell you to go online to find out.
I'm sure you all can see the problem with this. Namely, that the STRATEGY GUIDE that you PAID for doesn't actually have the information you need and is telling you to go ONLINE to find it. There is so goddamn much wrong with this. For starters, how about the fact that you paid for NOTHING. This guide was sold at the regular rate a strategy guide was sold for, yet had consistently incomplete strategy within it. If this had been a car, you would have paid full price for a car with three quarters of its engine missing. There would be LAWS in place that this transaction would violate!
Next, how about the fact that the only reason to buy a walkthrough by the time of FF9's release, as mentioned above, was because of either an inability to go online or a choice not to? As I mentioned, online game assistance was well-established by the year 2000! People buying this strategy guide for any real purpose were doing so because they wanted to see tips INSIDE the book they were buying. So, not only is it a rip-off because it doesn't actually do what it's supposed to--give all-inclusive information about the game--but it's a rip-off twice over because the paltry substitution for the information, its PlayOnline codes, are things that the only large group of people buying it didn't want or couldn't use.
To compound this idiocy, consider the marketing strategy here. Short-term, obviously Squaresoft was hoping that this would make people come to their site in droves, which would give them easier access to fans for future marketing purposes. Long-term...hell, not even long-term, just slightly-less-short-term, BradyGames was publishing a guide book that encourages, nay, requires its readers to become more familiar with the concept of finding information online by typing phrases into search boxes. BradyGames was essentially training its customers how to FIND INFORMATION ONLINE FOR FREE. Who the HELL was it that OK'd the idea of exposing the company's dwindling audience to its greatest threat?
And lastly, to finalize all this idiocy, the goddamn PlayOnline website? It hasn't had Final Fantasy 9 information on it for years now. Yeah, after all that, the strategy guide's pass codes can't be used any longer. Not exactly a product that endured time's test, here.
Yeah, so, overall, the FF9 strategy guide is one of the more unforgivably stupid and blatantly dishonest parts of SquareEnix's history--which, considering what company we're talking about, does say quite a lot. It's a farce of a product, it's transparent that it was made without any thought whatsoever of what the consumer might want or need, it's not even worth the paper it's printed on since the site dumped the FF9 data, and it taught readers how to find their information without having to pay for a strategy guide in the future so the companies wound up screwing themselves over worse than they did the players. It's a miserable, stupid failure on all sides. There's exactly one piece of useful knowledge to be culled from this entire guide: don't trust Square.
The internet changed this. Dramatically. By the time the Playstation 1 was in full swing, "teh intarwebz," to use its scientific title, was filling with walkthroughs, FAQs, and random tips and tricks dispersed on forums. At present, there are multiple locations a mere few clicks away for any given game out there that can pretty easily tell you everything you want to know about that game. Hell, you can often find a complete walkthrough available on GameFAQs for games that haven't even come out yet, because people will write them based on the original Japanese version released months before the US gets it. Even in extreme circumstances where some aspect of the game hasn't been addressed in an official walkthrough, you have quick and easy access to other people via forums, chat programs, and God knows what else--you're never in a position where you can't find a friend who can help you with a certain part of a game.
I know there are still physical walkthroughs sold nowadays, and God bless whoever's still doing it, because I have no idea how they stay in business. I guess they must really go all out on aesthetic appeal and target games that are complex enough that they can make the whole walkthrough look impressively huge to tempt buyers--I know I saw a Final Fantasy 13 one recently that was thicker than some college textbooks. But I'm pretty certain that the business must be a lot smaller than it was, and is likely to keep dwindling.
Now, back in late 2000, the fan-made walkthrough process was not quite as streamlined as it is now. But if it's in its fully-formed adult life now, it was at least in its competent teen years then. If you needed to know specific game information about pretty much any title, particularly one as popular as, say, Final Fantasy, you could find effective information quickly and easily. There were really only 3 reasons for a person to get a walkthrough for a popular video game. They were:
1. No reliable internet access. Hey, a lot of people still weren't really online at that point. Hell, there are still a fair amount of people in the present who aren't.
2. The aesthetic and/or collector value. Some people just LIKE to look at a page more than a computer screen when they read something. In many cases, I'm one of them (though not in this one; to me a walkthrough is a walkthrough, electronic or paper). They just wanted to get their answers from a physical guide.
3. They happened to walk into a game store on the day that the store was getting rid of its old walkthroughs that weren't selling, and were offered the pretty good deal of 7 game walkthroughs for 1 cent.
That 3rd one there was considerably less common than the beginning 2 reasons, though; I can only really confirm it having happened once. But anyway, the major reasons I can think of, in 2000 AD, to buy a physical strategy guide revolved around lack of internet and preference for paper. Remember this.
So, enough introduction paragraphs. Let's actually try talking about the subject of the rant. For every major Final Fantasy game that comes out for over a decade, there has been an Official Strategy Guide released for it. In 2000, it was Final Fantasy 9's turn, and Brady Games was the one to release the official game guide for it. At first glance, it seems good enough...decent-looking cover, thick enough that it's probably pretty comprehensive, promises that it's the official strategy guide on the front, which must mean that it has everything inside you could possibly need to know about the game. Right?
Alright, so we go along...acknowledgement page, table of contents...hm, what's this? 3rd page in, there's the introduction, and then a section entitled "Using This Book." A quick glance will tell the reader that the "key element" in this strategy guide is its ties with PlayOnline, a website in which you type a keyword, as indicated by the book, and get detailed information about that part of the game, be it an item, location, boss, or something else. The next page gives a visual representation of what the PlayOnline keyword boxes in the guide will look like.
Uh...okay...
Moving on, the next pages cover the basics of gameplay, expanding with superfluous jabber and charts into a half dozen pages what a tiny instruction manual managed to adequately explain already. But oh well, not important.
Ah-ha! Having done with basic information, it's time to get on with the specific info! Here come the character pages! Time to learn about the characters of the ga--wait, what? What is this?
Since you are (probably) not looking at the guide yourself, allow me to describe what I see here. The page starts with the main character, Zidane. There is a brief explanation of who he is and what kind of stuff he equips. There is then a section called "Stealing Items," which very lightly touches upon Zidane's ability to steal from enemies, and...that's it. Where's the information about his other abilities? He's got quite a few. They just mention in passing that he has other ones. But what are they? They don't list any of--oh, wait. The blue PlayOnline box on the side is saying something. It's saying that if you want to know anything substantial about what Zidane, the character you'll be using almost from start to finish in this game, can do in combat, you'll have to go to the PlayOnline site to find out. Yes, the guide whose purpose for existence is to help you to play the game effectively will not tell you of the capabilities of the character you'll be using.
Oh, no, wait. Characters, plural. ALL of the characters' pages have PlayOnline password boxes where the actual information on their skills should have been. In some cases, there are multiple instances of PlayOnline boxes withholding essential data for a single character.
Now, if you continue onwards, you'll find some pages about the abilities for each character, which DOES list out what abilities the character can learn, and what they do. But still the PlayOnline boxes are holding hostage any detailed information about these abilities, such as, for example, their power, the amount of MP they use, how/where to learn them and how much time is required for the learning process, and so on. If you want detailed information, or, to quote the guide, "a complete list of each character's abilities," you have to put the guide book down and go online for it.
It pretty much just goes downhill from this point. No matter what information you're looking to obtain from this guide, you'll only find, at most, half the story in its pages, with all the details having been kidnapped by the infernal PlayOnline blue boxes. Desire detailed locations for the game's weapons? Gotta look online. Want to know what characters learn from Accessories? Also online. Have an interest, for some unfathomable reason, to better understand the Tetra Master card minigame? Every goddamn aspect they list has had some of its information relocated to PlayOnline.
And things get REAL bad when they start the actual walkthrough itself. Want the guide to give you any information about where to upgrade your party's equipment when you reach a new town? Go to PlayOnline. Want to know where special hidden items are located in any given dungeon/town/whatever? Go to PlayOnline. Want to know anything at all about the Frog Catching and Chocobo Digging sidequests? From what I can see, you have to go to PlayOnline for any knowledge of them beyond their names. Want to know what rewards you could get from the Stellazio Coin sidequest? Go to PlayOnline. Need any strategy for dealing with a boss that's more complex than "Use strongest spells with mage, heal with healer, and steal with thief?" Go to PlayOnline.
Basically, if you want to know anything about this game more complicated than what general direction to have your character walk in next, there's a 50-50 chance that the guide's gonna tell you to go online to find out.
I'm sure you all can see the problem with this. Namely, that the STRATEGY GUIDE that you PAID for doesn't actually have the information you need and is telling you to go ONLINE to find it. There is so goddamn much wrong with this. For starters, how about the fact that you paid for NOTHING. This guide was sold at the regular rate a strategy guide was sold for, yet had consistently incomplete strategy within it. If this had been a car, you would have paid full price for a car with three quarters of its engine missing. There would be LAWS in place that this transaction would violate!
Next, how about the fact that the only reason to buy a walkthrough by the time of FF9's release, as mentioned above, was because of either an inability to go online or a choice not to? As I mentioned, online game assistance was well-established by the year 2000! People buying this strategy guide for any real purpose were doing so because they wanted to see tips INSIDE the book they were buying. So, not only is it a rip-off because it doesn't actually do what it's supposed to--give all-inclusive information about the game--but it's a rip-off twice over because the paltry substitution for the information, its PlayOnline codes, are things that the only large group of people buying it didn't want or couldn't use.
To compound this idiocy, consider the marketing strategy here. Short-term, obviously Squaresoft was hoping that this would make people come to their site in droves, which would give them easier access to fans for future marketing purposes. Long-term...hell, not even long-term, just slightly-less-short-term, BradyGames was publishing a guide book that encourages, nay, requires its readers to become more familiar with the concept of finding information online by typing phrases into search boxes. BradyGames was essentially training its customers how to FIND INFORMATION ONLINE FOR FREE. Who the HELL was it that OK'd the idea of exposing the company's dwindling audience to its greatest threat?
And lastly, to finalize all this idiocy, the goddamn PlayOnline website? It hasn't had Final Fantasy 9 information on it for years now. Yeah, after all that, the strategy guide's pass codes can't be used any longer. Not exactly a product that endured time's test, here.
Yeah, so, overall, the FF9 strategy guide is one of the more unforgivably stupid and blatantly dishonest parts of SquareEnix's history--which, considering what company we're talking about, does say quite a lot. It's a farce of a product, it's transparent that it was made without any thought whatsoever of what the consumer might want or need, it's not even worth the paper it's printed on since the site dumped the FF9 data, and it taught readers how to find their information without having to pay for a strategy guide in the future so the companies wound up screwing themselves over worse than they did the players. It's a miserable, stupid failure on all sides. There's exactly one piece of useful knowledge to be culled from this entire guide: don't trust Square.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Phantasy Star 1
I did a rant recently on The Magic of Scheherazade, and the many ways it was really noteworthy for its time (and the fact that it STILL has some aspects that are creative and different even in the present day), and it was fun. So hey, why not look at another laudable, ancient RPG? An even older one, this time!
When it comes to console RPGs, Phantasy Star 1 for the Sega Master System is one of the oldest to be found. I actually never owned a SMS, myself, and only played PS1 for the first time half a dozen years ago when it was rereleased on the Gameboy Advance. But once I finally did play it, something like 20 years late, I was reasonably impressed with it (and I didn't have to worry about the feeling coming from any sense of nostalgia)--Phantasy Star 1, I found, was quite a pioneer for RPGs in several ways.
One of the earliest RPGs to feature a world map--multiple world maps, in fact. One of the earliest RPGs to give its cast personalities shown through game dialogue. First Science Fiction RPG. All pretty important moments for RPGs. There are 2 aspects of PS1, though, that I feel were its most important contributions to the newborn genre of video game RPGs.
The first is the cut scene. While not totally unknown before the Playstation 1 era of RPGs, proper cut scenes, now a rather huge part of console RPGs, only became commonplace once RPGs hit the 32-Bit scene.* Additionally, most of the times prior to the Playstation-Saturn-N64 where an RPG had a cut scene, it was almost always just reserved for the end, which hardly qualifies it as a cut scene at all. I mean, sure, early RPGs like Startropics and Crystalis had endings with art scenes shown, but a player kind of expects that an ending should pull out all the stops, and it's just one, final place. Phantasy Star 1, on the other hand, has a small handful of cut scenes scattered throughout its adventure's span, seen during the story's most important moments. They're humble, to be sure--scenes of art depicting game events and characters that have to make do with a very limited set of colors and graphical capabilities--but they're certainly not bad, and just the fact that a game on the archaic Sega Master System has them, in multiple instances, is quite impressive. It's not that other old RPGs don't make a try at this sort of thing on occasion--as I said, I recall the endings to Crystalis and Startropics 1, both NES games, having comparable scenes in them...but to my knowledge, PS1 came before them, and was the first to actually include these scenes during the course of the actual game.
More important still to me is the fact that Phantasy Star 1 is, as far as I am aware, the first console RPG--possibly the first video game RPG, period--to star a female protagonist. In 1987, a female protagonist for any video game was almost unheard of; it had only been the year before that the gaming world was blown away by the revelation that Metroid's Samus was a woman. I'm pretty sure that having a heroine was something the RPG genre hadn't made any serious attempt at before PS1, so that's quite something. What makes it even more noteworthy is that Alis is actually a protagonist with a bit of depth, having motivations to go on her quest besides just being unable to deny the whimsical commands of the person holding the controller. A main character with any sort of personality and depth of character was uncommon back then, when RPG characters were most often standard silent protagonists. So not only did PS1 have a female protagonist, but it made her one of the best main heroes of her generation of RPGs. That's worth some recognition; it would be a while before RPGs would see any significant number of leading women, and also a bit of time before the idea of a protagonist that has any sort of plot relevance would take hold in RPGs.
That's about all I can think of, but I'd say that's certainly enough. From the smaller details to the way it pushed the envelope in quality of story telling, Phantasy Star 1 was a trailblazer for the RPG genre, and I say kudos to it for its contributions.
* This depends, of course, on how you define a cut scene. Technically speaking, you can say that any scene in an RPG where you don't have regular control is a cut scene, and so, given all the story events and dialogue of any given Role Playing Game, at least half the game is a series of cut scenes. But that perspective is lame and uninteresting. When I say a cut scene, I mean a part of the story being told in sequential art, animated FMVs, real-life video, that sort of thing. Something special, different, a part (hopefully) so important that it has to be shown as well as possible through art beyond the game's regular capacity.
When it comes to console RPGs, Phantasy Star 1 for the Sega Master System is one of the oldest to be found. I actually never owned a SMS, myself, and only played PS1 for the first time half a dozen years ago when it was rereleased on the Gameboy Advance. But once I finally did play it, something like 20 years late, I was reasonably impressed with it (and I didn't have to worry about the feeling coming from any sense of nostalgia)--Phantasy Star 1, I found, was quite a pioneer for RPGs in several ways.
One of the earliest RPGs to feature a world map--multiple world maps, in fact. One of the earliest RPGs to give its cast personalities shown through game dialogue. First Science Fiction RPG. All pretty important moments for RPGs. There are 2 aspects of PS1, though, that I feel were its most important contributions to the newborn genre of video game RPGs.
The first is the cut scene. While not totally unknown before the Playstation 1 era of RPGs, proper cut scenes, now a rather huge part of console RPGs, only became commonplace once RPGs hit the 32-Bit scene.* Additionally, most of the times prior to the Playstation-Saturn-N64 where an RPG had a cut scene, it was almost always just reserved for the end, which hardly qualifies it as a cut scene at all. I mean, sure, early RPGs like Startropics and Crystalis had endings with art scenes shown, but a player kind of expects that an ending should pull out all the stops, and it's just one, final place. Phantasy Star 1, on the other hand, has a small handful of cut scenes scattered throughout its adventure's span, seen during the story's most important moments. They're humble, to be sure--scenes of art depicting game events and characters that have to make do with a very limited set of colors and graphical capabilities--but they're certainly not bad, and just the fact that a game on the archaic Sega Master System has them, in multiple instances, is quite impressive. It's not that other old RPGs don't make a try at this sort of thing on occasion--as I said, I recall the endings to Crystalis and Startropics 1, both NES games, having comparable scenes in them...but to my knowledge, PS1 came before them, and was the first to actually include these scenes during the course of the actual game.
More important still to me is the fact that Phantasy Star 1 is, as far as I am aware, the first console RPG--possibly the first video game RPG, period--to star a female protagonist. In 1987, a female protagonist for any video game was almost unheard of; it had only been the year before that the gaming world was blown away by the revelation that Metroid's Samus was a woman. I'm pretty sure that having a heroine was something the RPG genre hadn't made any serious attempt at before PS1, so that's quite something. What makes it even more noteworthy is that Alis is actually a protagonist with a bit of depth, having motivations to go on her quest besides just being unable to deny the whimsical commands of the person holding the controller. A main character with any sort of personality and depth of character was uncommon back then, when RPG characters were most often standard silent protagonists. So not only did PS1 have a female protagonist, but it made her one of the best main heroes of her generation of RPGs. That's worth some recognition; it would be a while before RPGs would see any significant number of leading women, and also a bit of time before the idea of a protagonist that has any sort of plot relevance would take hold in RPGs.
That's about all I can think of, but I'd say that's certainly enough. From the smaller details to the way it pushed the envelope in quality of story telling, Phantasy Star 1 was a trailblazer for the RPG genre, and I say kudos to it for its contributions.
* This depends, of course, on how you define a cut scene. Technically speaking, you can say that any scene in an RPG where you don't have regular control is a cut scene, and so, given all the story events and dialogue of any given Role Playing Game, at least half the game is a series of cut scenes. But that perspective is lame and uninteresting. When I say a cut scene, I mean a part of the story being told in sequential art, animated FMVs, real-life video, that sort of thing. Something special, different, a part (hopefully) so important that it has to be shown as well as possible through art beyond the game's regular capacity.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Chrono Cross's Accent System
Chrono Cross is a terrible RPG. This is an accepted truth by most people who have played it, and it seems likely that those few pitiable wretches who believe otherwise are a danger to themselves, their minds unable to distinguish between pleasure and horrible agony.
But what MAKES it such a legendary example of poor gaming? Well, the reasons are actually comparatively few, just very weighty. The first I may some day get into, but not today--the fact that the story is about as convoluted, nonsensical, stupid, jumbled, and poorly explained as is humanly possible. I mean, I guess I HAVE seen one RPG plot that was even more tangled and silly, which was the inexplicable, stupid insanity of Robotrek. But in Robotrek's favor, as unmanageable as its plot was, that game wasn't actually trying to pass itself off as particularly meaningful or deep. Chrono Cross you're actually supposed to take SERIOUSLY.
The second, and really only other, problem with Chrono Cross is its cast. Like I said, not very many problems...but those problems encompass pretty much everything that matters in an RPG. The problem with the characters I've delved into once before, in my Chrono Cross's Characters rant, but that rant only really told half the story of why CC's cast just didn't work. And to be sure, a major part of why it didn't function was covered there--namely, how stupid and inane the plot-significant characters were. But the other half of the equation for CC's suckitude lies with the accent system.
See, it's like this. Chrono Cross has a lot of party members in it. A huge lot. As in, over 40 individuals that can join the party exist in this game. That's pretty much the biggest cast you're gonna see in an RPG whose title doesn't start with "Suikoden." This cast's size makes me suspect that Squaresoft really just wanted to have a huge cast for the bragging rights, not because it thought it needed all or even half of the characters for any purpose of quality. The suspicion of mine that this development decision was about quantity rather than quality is supported substantially by the fact that CC's cast wound up including a Mexican wrestler, a bobble-head alien, a talking clown skeleton, and an anthropomorphic turnip. It's a little hard to buy that a story's thematic narrative couldn't have been properly achieved without a walking vegetable swinging a sword around.
So once Square has its cast of mermaids, cyborgs, mutants, beach bum doctors, pirates, and more, it is faced with the enormous task of making them actual characters, personalities instead of just brightly-colored chunks of meat to fill your party with. Trying to give them all their own stories and side quests that develop them is a method far too time-consuming and competent for the writers of Chrono Cross, so almost everyone's defining scenes of characterization in this game are extremely short and choppy, a hurried assurance by Squaresoft that they haven't totally forgotten that the character exists, who's more a momentary distraction from the game than a part of it.
But that's okay! Because, you see, Squaresoft still has its secret weapon for character development, the ultimate tool for setting their characters apart and giving them personality and depth! And that tool is...the Accent System! What is that, you ask, or maybe don't since you would know if you'd played Chrono Cross and you wouldn't be reading this rant if you hadn't? Why, the Accent System takes one line of dialogue and adds one of dozens of different accents to it to make it different! Need a party member to say something, but don't want to write different lines of dialogue for all 40+ possible members? The Accent System fixes this problem in a jiffy! Just write one single line, like, say, "Serge, you are very dull," and throw it into the Accent System, and you're all set! Is the weird alien Starky in the party? He'll say, "Seeeeerge is veeeeery duuuuuull." Is Poshul, the talking purple dog, there, instead? She'll say "Thergy-poo, you are very durr." What about that foreign cook guy, Orcha? He'll say, "Serge, CHA are very dull." Hence, the Accent System makes writing party reactions and dialogue easy, allowing for one set of script to account for the words of 40 characters!
Yeah. Here's the problem with that. An accent should NEVER be the defining characteristic of a character.* Not in RPGs, not in ANYTHING. If the only personality trait that distinguishes a cave girl, a boxing bartender, a revered military general, and a rock star from one another is HOW they say words, not WHAT words they say, then your failure as a writer has brought shame to yourself and every human being you've ever interacted with.
Characters' reactions during a game's course help to develop them in small, and sometimes even big, ways. Even if they share a similar reaction, never should 2 different people say the exact same thing. Because if the only difference between 2 characters is whether they'll say a single sentence with a French or Olde English accent, you don't HAVE 2 characters. You have 1 character that can just change bodies. Each individual personality on an RPG's team that you want to develop through interactions with a plot in motion needs to have their interactions be genuine for them, needs to have the dialogue and actions tailored for them, not the other way around.
You want an example of how it SHOULD be, let's take a look at a couple other games. For starters, Dragon Age 1. As you go through the game, the members of your party will at times react to what's happening and offer their advice and opinions to the protagonist. What they say, how they react, depends on who is there. If the protagonist chooses, for example, to spare an enemy's life, Leliana or Wynne will approve of the decision, and make their approval known. Morrigan or Sten, on the other hand, may disapprove of this mercy, and say so. Each one will react in a way that is characteristic of THAT individual, rather than just have a generic response that they all parrot with different inflections. This, as much as the private scenes and conversations of character development, develops the party members of Dragon Age 1 and makes them memorable, unique, and worthwhile. In addition, there are certain moments where one character may react to a situation while the other party members may not, simply because the situation has more relevance to that one character. There aren't just uniform places where the characters have to convey something, there are also places where only certain individuals will have something to share. This further cements the individual aspects of each character.
A lot of games do this. And, provided that the people writing the game are reasonably good at what they do, it works well. Come to think of it, I seem to recall one game in particular that had its cast members react to things and say stuff in ways appropriately tailored to them, where even if the script called for any companion to have the same reaction as the others would at that point, they still had their own way of expressing the uniform reaction, the dialogue made for them as individuals. Now what was the name of that game, again?
Oh, yeah. Chrono Trigger.
So it's not like Squaresoft didn't have an example at hand to follow on how to use their characters. They did. It was the game that Chrono Cross was a sequel to. But no, they decided it would be a great idea to write one character's dialogue and then use it for 43 different characters, with the hopes that the player might be fooled into thinking there was some difference between any of these 43 individuals by a few mild grammatical variations.
And hey, I realize that it would be a ridiculous amount of work to have to write an entire game's worth of dialogue for over 40 characters. I do. But you know what the solution to that problem is? DON'T HAVE SO DAMN MANY CHARACTERS. This game wouldn't have suffered from not having a fucking talking voodoo doll in your party. None of its narrative "quality" would have been lost without the addition of the half-man, half-mushroom. This game didn't by any stretch of the imagination need even half of its playable cast. The answer was NOT to find a way to do LESS work than ever by using Babel Fish to cover their asses.
* Not that Squaresoft hasn't tried to have it that way before. I mean, take away the pirate lingo and Final Fantasy 5's Faris is about as bland and uninteresting as...well, every other FF5 character.
But what MAKES it such a legendary example of poor gaming? Well, the reasons are actually comparatively few, just very weighty. The first I may some day get into, but not today--the fact that the story is about as convoluted, nonsensical, stupid, jumbled, and poorly explained as is humanly possible. I mean, I guess I HAVE seen one RPG plot that was even more tangled and silly, which was the inexplicable, stupid insanity of Robotrek. But in Robotrek's favor, as unmanageable as its plot was, that game wasn't actually trying to pass itself off as particularly meaningful or deep. Chrono Cross you're actually supposed to take SERIOUSLY.
The second, and really only other, problem with Chrono Cross is its cast. Like I said, not very many problems...but those problems encompass pretty much everything that matters in an RPG. The problem with the characters I've delved into once before, in my Chrono Cross's Characters rant, but that rant only really told half the story of why CC's cast just didn't work. And to be sure, a major part of why it didn't function was covered there--namely, how stupid and inane the plot-significant characters were. But the other half of the equation for CC's suckitude lies with the accent system.
See, it's like this. Chrono Cross has a lot of party members in it. A huge lot. As in, over 40 individuals that can join the party exist in this game. That's pretty much the biggest cast you're gonna see in an RPG whose title doesn't start with "Suikoden." This cast's size makes me suspect that Squaresoft really just wanted to have a huge cast for the bragging rights, not because it thought it needed all or even half of the characters for any purpose of quality. The suspicion of mine that this development decision was about quantity rather than quality is supported substantially by the fact that CC's cast wound up including a Mexican wrestler, a bobble-head alien, a talking clown skeleton, and an anthropomorphic turnip. It's a little hard to buy that a story's thematic narrative couldn't have been properly achieved without a walking vegetable swinging a sword around.
So once Square has its cast of mermaids, cyborgs, mutants, beach bum doctors, pirates, and more, it is faced with the enormous task of making them actual characters, personalities instead of just brightly-colored chunks of meat to fill your party with. Trying to give them all their own stories and side quests that develop them is a method far too time-consuming and competent for the writers of Chrono Cross, so almost everyone's defining scenes of characterization in this game are extremely short and choppy, a hurried assurance by Squaresoft that they haven't totally forgotten that the character exists, who's more a momentary distraction from the game than a part of it.
But that's okay! Because, you see, Squaresoft still has its secret weapon for character development, the ultimate tool for setting their characters apart and giving them personality and depth! And that tool is...the Accent System! What is that, you ask, or maybe don't since you would know if you'd played Chrono Cross and you wouldn't be reading this rant if you hadn't? Why, the Accent System takes one line of dialogue and adds one of dozens of different accents to it to make it different! Need a party member to say something, but don't want to write different lines of dialogue for all 40+ possible members? The Accent System fixes this problem in a jiffy! Just write one single line, like, say, "Serge, you are very dull," and throw it into the Accent System, and you're all set! Is the weird alien Starky in the party? He'll say, "Seeeeerge is veeeeery duuuuuull." Is Poshul, the talking purple dog, there, instead? She'll say "Thergy-poo, you are very durr." What about that foreign cook guy, Orcha? He'll say, "Serge, CHA are very dull." Hence, the Accent System makes writing party reactions and dialogue easy, allowing for one set of script to account for the words of 40 characters!
Yeah. Here's the problem with that. An accent should NEVER be the defining characteristic of a character.* Not in RPGs, not in ANYTHING. If the only personality trait that distinguishes a cave girl, a boxing bartender, a revered military general, and a rock star from one another is HOW they say words, not WHAT words they say, then your failure as a writer has brought shame to yourself and every human being you've ever interacted with.
Characters' reactions during a game's course help to develop them in small, and sometimes even big, ways. Even if they share a similar reaction, never should 2 different people say the exact same thing. Because if the only difference between 2 characters is whether they'll say a single sentence with a French or Olde English accent, you don't HAVE 2 characters. You have 1 character that can just change bodies. Each individual personality on an RPG's team that you want to develop through interactions with a plot in motion needs to have their interactions be genuine for them, needs to have the dialogue and actions tailored for them, not the other way around.
You want an example of how it SHOULD be, let's take a look at a couple other games. For starters, Dragon Age 1. As you go through the game, the members of your party will at times react to what's happening and offer their advice and opinions to the protagonist. What they say, how they react, depends on who is there. If the protagonist chooses, for example, to spare an enemy's life, Leliana or Wynne will approve of the decision, and make their approval known. Morrigan or Sten, on the other hand, may disapprove of this mercy, and say so. Each one will react in a way that is characteristic of THAT individual, rather than just have a generic response that they all parrot with different inflections. This, as much as the private scenes and conversations of character development, develops the party members of Dragon Age 1 and makes them memorable, unique, and worthwhile. In addition, there are certain moments where one character may react to a situation while the other party members may not, simply because the situation has more relevance to that one character. There aren't just uniform places where the characters have to convey something, there are also places where only certain individuals will have something to share. This further cements the individual aspects of each character.
A lot of games do this. And, provided that the people writing the game are reasonably good at what they do, it works well. Come to think of it, I seem to recall one game in particular that had its cast members react to things and say stuff in ways appropriately tailored to them, where even if the script called for any companion to have the same reaction as the others would at that point, they still had their own way of expressing the uniform reaction, the dialogue made for them as individuals. Now what was the name of that game, again?
Oh, yeah. Chrono Trigger.
So it's not like Squaresoft didn't have an example at hand to follow on how to use their characters. They did. It was the game that Chrono Cross was a sequel to. But no, they decided it would be a great idea to write one character's dialogue and then use it for 43 different characters, with the hopes that the player might be fooled into thinking there was some difference between any of these 43 individuals by a few mild grammatical variations.
And hey, I realize that it would be a ridiculous amount of work to have to write an entire game's worth of dialogue for over 40 characters. I do. But you know what the solution to that problem is? DON'T HAVE SO DAMN MANY CHARACTERS. This game wouldn't have suffered from not having a fucking talking voodoo doll in your party. None of its narrative "quality" would have been lost without the addition of the half-man, half-mushroom. This game didn't by any stretch of the imagination need even half of its playable cast. The answer was NOT to find a way to do LESS work than ever by using Babel Fish to cover their asses.
* Not that Squaresoft hasn't tried to have it that way before. I mean, take away the pirate lingo and Final Fantasy 5's Faris is about as bland and uninteresting as...well, every other FF5 character.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Fallout: New Vegas's Wild Wasteland Trait
So, Fallout games, like many PC RPGs, start by having the player create a character, choosing skills and stat distributions for their character that will (hopefully) aid the gamer in playing according to their preferred style. One of the distinctions the player may give their character is what Traits the character will have. Traits are certain characteristics that will change somewhat what the character can do in a general sense, almost always having both a positive and negative effect. For example, the Trait Gifted gives the player an extra 7 points to distribute to the character's stats, but at the cost of lowered skills, while the Kamikaze Trait increases a character's battle speed, but lessens the character's defenses. Obviously, it's not always an even trade--Gifted's penalty is paltry compared to its benefit, while in some Fallout titles it takes some work to play in a way that Kamikaze is going to be worth its cost.
Fallout: New Vegas introduces a new Trait called Wild Wasteland. Wild Wasteland basically allows the player to encounter various scenarios in the game which are a bit silly and fun, somewhat zany stuff put in for kicks. For example, the player can find in his/her travels a burnt old refrigerator with a charred corpse inside alongside a hat which suggests that the skeleton was Indiana Jones, referencing one of the most overwhelmingly stupid moments in film history, the scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull during which Indiana Jones survives ground zero of a nuclear bomb's explosion by climbing into a refrigerator.* The Wild Wasteland Trait puts a bunch of fun little references like this into the game, as well as adding a few extra lines to the Mr. New Vegas talk show radio station thingy, some comments in the credits, and even a few weapons you couldn't get otherwise, like an Alien Blaster and Holy Hand Grenades. Fun!
Now here's the damn problem: this should never have been a Trait.
See, Fallout? The series? It's filled with this stuff. As a general rule, any Fallout game you play will have a load of special, goofy encounters you can get into that are just there for shits and giggles. In Fallout 1, you can, during your travels across the wasteland, stumble across Doctor Who's TARDIS, or a herd of talking cows, among other things. Phil the Nuka-Cola guy in Fallout Tactics, all the Monty Python references in Fallout 2...hell, the entire (crappy) Mothership Zeta add-on for Fallout 3 falls into the category of these bizarre, odd little events that Wild Wasteland encompasses. Hell, some of the Wild Wasteland stuff has been done before previously in the games--the Timmy-falling-down-the-well gag in Fallout: New Vegas was already done in Fallout 2 (and not even as a special encounter, but rather right in the middle of a normal town), and, while not normally accessible due to a bug, Fallout 2 also had the Holy Hand Grenades first, too. The Alien Blaster's been a part of the series since its appearance in a special encounter in Fallout 1 as a joke weapon (albeit a devastatingly powerful one). There were comments for the credits in Fallout 1 and 2 just as there are for Wild Wasteland-enabled Fallout: New Vegas.
In short, interjecting the occasional bit of goofy humor is meant to be an inextricable part of the Fallout series. It has been that way from the very start! It's part of the charm and atmosphere of the series, and Fallout isn't complete without it. So why the hell is it an optional trait in Fallout: New Vegas?
I know, it seems like a small thing, but it nonetheless does bother me quite a bit. The idea behind this was that it was a compromise between members of the creative team behind Fallout: New Vegas who thought these wacky ideas would be fun, and other members who thought it would be out of place. So basically, a disagreement between people who people who knew anything at all about the game they were creating, and humorless nitwits who had no idea what they were doing. The thing that gets me riled up over this is the fact that there could be a significant number of people on the staff developing Fallout: New Vegas who had such a poor idea of what a Fallout game is supposed to entail. It worries me that future Fallout games could see less and less of these tidbits of humor and fun that have been a complimentary, necessary companion to the series's solemn and gritty atmosphere from the start.
And to give myself a little ground to stand on besides just vague worries, I'd like to note that having the Wild Wasteland Trait present in the game means that those who want a true Fallout experience will have one fewer Traits to choose from for their character. You only get to choose 2 at the start of the game, and a player might not want to have to give up a desirable Trait, gameplay-wise, just because someone on the developing team didn't have the sense to make the Wild Wasteland stuff a normal part of the game.
I'd also like to point out that if there is ANY Fallout title where the Wild Wasteland components were appropriate, it would be this one! I mean, Fallout 3? The setting and theme of that Fallout were just overall more serious and epic than previous games, so I could see someone arguing that too much goofy stuff could interfere with the game's intent. The game's focus is on Washington, D.C., and several themes strongly tied to America's policies, history, and human rights are prevalent. Heavy stuff. Fallout: New Vegas, on the other hand, is focused on Las Vegas and its surrounding area, and the majority of its themes and plot focus relate to the parts of American culture that Las Vegas influences. Oh, there's plenty of other great references to and examinations of American culture in Fallout: New Vegas not directly tied to Las Vegas, but still, the ideas and ideals of Vegas are predominant.
So how, exactly, is it NOT appropriate to the game to include a bunch of weird, silly, fun stuff in it? Really bizarre shit is PART of Las Vegas. A BIG part. One of the only decent comedy movies to come out in the past decade, The Hangover, built its entire premise around how much crazy, over-the-top shit you can encounter in a single night in Las Vegas. It's like a goddamn paradise for hedonistic insanity. If there was ever a Fallout where the Wild Wasteland stuff wouldn't be out of place, it would be this one! Playing without it is removing an (albeit small) aspect of the game's symbolic qualities.
So yeah. Wild Wasteland's content should be part of the game and not just optional, and forcing the player to give up on one of the regular Traits to experience the Wild Wasteland stuff is unfair. I sure hope they never have such a divorce of the zany stuff from the game proper in any future titles.
* Thank GOD I don't do a rant blog on movies. I could scream at the sheer, unparalleled idiocy of this scene for at least 20 pages.
Fallout: New Vegas introduces a new Trait called Wild Wasteland. Wild Wasteland basically allows the player to encounter various scenarios in the game which are a bit silly and fun, somewhat zany stuff put in for kicks. For example, the player can find in his/her travels a burnt old refrigerator with a charred corpse inside alongside a hat which suggests that the skeleton was Indiana Jones, referencing one of the most overwhelmingly stupid moments in film history, the scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull during which Indiana Jones survives ground zero of a nuclear bomb's explosion by climbing into a refrigerator.* The Wild Wasteland Trait puts a bunch of fun little references like this into the game, as well as adding a few extra lines to the Mr. New Vegas talk show radio station thingy, some comments in the credits, and even a few weapons you couldn't get otherwise, like an Alien Blaster and Holy Hand Grenades. Fun!
Now here's the damn problem: this should never have been a Trait.
See, Fallout? The series? It's filled with this stuff. As a general rule, any Fallout game you play will have a load of special, goofy encounters you can get into that are just there for shits and giggles. In Fallout 1, you can, during your travels across the wasteland, stumble across Doctor Who's TARDIS, or a herd of talking cows, among other things. Phil the Nuka-Cola guy in Fallout Tactics, all the Monty Python references in Fallout 2...hell, the entire (crappy) Mothership Zeta add-on for Fallout 3 falls into the category of these bizarre, odd little events that Wild Wasteland encompasses. Hell, some of the Wild Wasteland stuff has been done before previously in the games--the Timmy-falling-down-the-well gag in Fallout: New Vegas was already done in Fallout 2 (and not even as a special encounter, but rather right in the middle of a normal town), and, while not normally accessible due to a bug, Fallout 2 also had the Holy Hand Grenades first, too. The Alien Blaster's been a part of the series since its appearance in a special encounter in Fallout 1 as a joke weapon (albeit a devastatingly powerful one). There were comments for the credits in Fallout 1 and 2 just as there are for Wild Wasteland-enabled Fallout: New Vegas.
In short, interjecting the occasional bit of goofy humor is meant to be an inextricable part of the Fallout series. It has been that way from the very start! It's part of the charm and atmosphere of the series, and Fallout isn't complete without it. So why the hell is it an optional trait in Fallout: New Vegas?
I know, it seems like a small thing, but it nonetheless does bother me quite a bit. The idea behind this was that it was a compromise between members of the creative team behind Fallout: New Vegas who thought these wacky ideas would be fun, and other members who thought it would be out of place. So basically, a disagreement between people who people who knew anything at all about the game they were creating, and humorless nitwits who had no idea what they were doing. The thing that gets me riled up over this is the fact that there could be a significant number of people on the staff developing Fallout: New Vegas who had such a poor idea of what a Fallout game is supposed to entail. It worries me that future Fallout games could see less and less of these tidbits of humor and fun that have been a complimentary, necessary companion to the series's solemn and gritty atmosphere from the start.
And to give myself a little ground to stand on besides just vague worries, I'd like to note that having the Wild Wasteland Trait present in the game means that those who want a true Fallout experience will have one fewer Traits to choose from for their character. You only get to choose 2 at the start of the game, and a player might not want to have to give up a desirable Trait, gameplay-wise, just because someone on the developing team didn't have the sense to make the Wild Wasteland stuff a normal part of the game.
I'd also like to point out that if there is ANY Fallout title where the Wild Wasteland components were appropriate, it would be this one! I mean, Fallout 3? The setting and theme of that Fallout were just overall more serious and epic than previous games, so I could see someone arguing that too much goofy stuff could interfere with the game's intent. The game's focus is on Washington, D.C., and several themes strongly tied to America's policies, history, and human rights are prevalent. Heavy stuff. Fallout: New Vegas, on the other hand, is focused on Las Vegas and its surrounding area, and the majority of its themes and plot focus relate to the parts of American culture that Las Vegas influences. Oh, there's plenty of other great references to and examinations of American culture in Fallout: New Vegas not directly tied to Las Vegas, but still, the ideas and ideals of Vegas are predominant.
So how, exactly, is it NOT appropriate to the game to include a bunch of weird, silly, fun stuff in it? Really bizarre shit is PART of Las Vegas. A BIG part. One of the only decent comedy movies to come out in the past decade, The Hangover, built its entire premise around how much crazy, over-the-top shit you can encounter in a single night in Las Vegas. It's like a goddamn paradise for hedonistic insanity. If there was ever a Fallout where the Wild Wasteland stuff wouldn't be out of place, it would be this one! Playing without it is removing an (albeit small) aspect of the game's symbolic qualities.
So yeah. Wild Wasteland's content should be part of the game and not just optional, and forcing the player to give up on one of the regular Traits to experience the Wild Wasteland stuff is unfair. I sure hope they never have such a divorce of the zany stuff from the game proper in any future titles.
* Thank GOD I don't do a rant blog on movies. I could scream at the sheer, unparalleled idiocy of this scene for at least 20 pages.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
General RPGs' AMVs 4
Yes, folks, it's that time once again...that magical time where I avoid having to say anything meaningful or worthwhile about RPGs, and instead just throw a bunch of Youtube links your way. Let's see what AMVs I've got for us to share today!
And as always, if you like any of these, please, vote them up or, better still, leave a comment saying what you thought of them. Quite a few of these seem to be almost completely ignored, and it really is a damn shame for someone to take the time and spend the effort to make a good product in a sea of lousy ones and then have it passed over.
FALLOUT
Fallout: New Vegas: Citizen Soldier, by Joylock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRX4AtqNMRQ
The music used is Citizen Soldier, by 3 Doors Down. Really, I don't know what to say about this. Joylock's Fallout 3 AMVs have made it into this rant blog twice before, once as part of one of these General RPG AMV rants and once as being so great as to deserve an individual rant. If you've seen them before, this is just more of the same--Joylock manipulates the Fallout game's engine to set certain scenes using certain characters, and basically creates a series of clips that not only connect strongly to the music that's playing in terms of lyrics and tone, but also shows the fundamental conflicts between good and evil contained within Fallout: New Vegas through the actions of the characters he manipulates, in a sense paraphrasing the game yet also exemplifying it. Great stuff, to be sure.
FINAL FANTASY
Final Fantasy 8: My Heart Will Go On, by T0mb0ner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvd8nfYedT4&feature=channel_video_title
The music used is...is...it's...it's My Heart Will Go On, by Celine Dion, okay? Yes. YES. I know. Look. Just...just watch the AMV, okay? As long as you can hold back the thick, hot bile that creeps up your throat at the thought of Squall and Rinoa, and as long as you can keep yourself from giggling at how unbelievably over-the-top this song's sappiness is...and I'm not saying that's easy...you can actually recognize that this AMV is honestly pretty good. The video works with the song and makes sense with the mood and lyrics, the effects are good, it all just works. God, I can't believe I actually like an AMV to this song. A Final Fantasy 8 AMV, no less! About Squall and Rinoa! Some dark magics must be at work here.
Final Fantasy 10: Burning in the Skies, by Junpei19870: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvJkJpRUipM
The music used is A Thousand Suns: The Full Experience, by Linkin Park. This video's good overall, and I particularly like the way it cuts to and from the Sending ceremony and the tragedy that led to it. Shows that Junpei19870 had ideas and some creativity in conveying them. The mood of the song works with the video very well overall, and there's some good moments of connection between the video and the lyrics, too. Overall, a nicely solemn and touching AMV that combines well the solemn and touching nature of both the song and a large portion of Final Fantasy 10's plot and themes.
Final Fantasy 12: The Last Conquest, by Resk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDUHO1TyGvo
The music used is Preliator, by Globus. Resk has had one of his AMVs featured here before, the Shadow Hearts: As the Warlock Said one, and gives another quality video with this offering. Resk's use of FF12 clips in conjunction with the epic, call-to-war music is so skillful, inspiring, and gripping that you can actually pretty easily forget how terminally boring and directionless the game actually was. Hell, this AMV is what FF12 SHOULD have been like; I feel like Resk has far better captured the essence of Yasumi Matsuno's vision for FF12 far better than the game itself did.
THE LEGEND OF DRAGOON
The Legend of Dragoon: Strength of Sacrifice, by Resk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRGqxqMIOn8
The music used is Hour of Destiny, by Junichi Nakatsuru--I think. The credits aren't clear. Hey, another AMV by Resk. I like that there are a few AMV-makers out there that don't just stop with one really good AMV, but manage to keep making them. The instrumental song is complimented very well by the LoD visuals, with Resk's editing present as scenes and events are matched to the tune's pitch and tone, and with a great many fades and overlays* and such effects to make it that much more visually appealing. A very nice work, indeed.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Real World, by SpeedDemon070: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwYeuUscBnE
The music used is Real World, by All-American Rejects. This AMV is just very well constructed, coordinating the scenes and effects to the music's lyrics and especially tone and shifts. There's really not much to say; it's just a very solid AMV.
MASS EFFECT
Mass Effect 1 + 2: Alive, by Vendo233: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aZfHgrPO9g
The music used is New Beginnings Remix, by Future World Music. Mass Effect gets more tribute videos like this than it does normal AMVs, but sometimes they're really very good. Most of these good ones are, of course, done by Geno|3oost, whose channel I directed you to last time. But Vendo233 does very nicely here, combining powerful, significant background music with appropriate visuals and the ever noteworthy dialogue of the games to create a tribute AMV that is pretty darn inspiring.
MY LITTLE PONY
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Ponysona 4, by MrSirPGW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jvam3L34FEo
The music used is Pursuing My True Self, from the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 soundtrack. Alright, I know I often pretend to know what words are going through my readers' heads, and I'm probably often wrong, but I'd bet good money that right now you are thinking to yourself something along the lines of, "That idiot, My Little Pony is not an RPG." And hey, no argument here. BUT! This AMV DOES still count as an RPG AMV, because even if the visual aspect of the video primarily uses footage from the MLP: Friendship is Magic cartoon, which, yes, again, I DO watch and think is pretty awesome, and I encourage you to watch it if you don't already because it will genuinely just make you happier...the overall premise is more strongly tied to an RPG (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4) than many other AMVs I've listed here are to their respective games. See, this is basically an AMV that takes the opening to SMTP4, from its visual style and backdrops to its music, and puts in the main (mane) characters from the My Little Pony cartoon. It's extremely faithful to the original opening video to the Persona 4 game, basically having the new characters do the same stuff in the same way as the original video made the Persona 4 characters. For example, the original opening takes off with the main character Souji spinning to face the watcher with various words and sentences of significance from the game in the background, while this one has the primary (pri-mare-y) character of MLP, Twilight Sparkle, do the same thing, using text from the show's opening (and a plea for Persona 4 fans not to kill the author) in the background. It's like this from start to finish, a well-planned and executed AMV that matches up really well to be a fun homage to the original opening video from Persona 4. Here, here's the original SMTP4 opening, if you don't have it handy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEwKj6W14Jo&feature=fvst . Watch them back to back--see what I mean? Since the majority of this semi-AMV's content is undeniably based on the RPG and not the non-RPG cartoon, I consider this one fair game for this rant. And while it's not incredible or anything, this AMV is harmlessly amusing, and its combining of Pony with Persona is basically seamless. You can tell it's not a half-assed effort or anything like that; someone wanted to make an AMV that was fun for its concept and for the fact that it's faithfully paying homage to the original SMTP4 through careful imitation.
PARASITE EVE
Parasite Eve 1: Killers Within, by Auron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbisAM1nMbU
The music used is Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn), by Rob Zombie. What can I say on this one, really? If you want an AMV that uses a dark, heavy, creepy song and a dark, heavy, creepy game to make a dark, heavy, creepy AMV, you probably can't do any better than this one. Sure, it doesn't seem to have much of a point, and while most of the effects are really cool, the black strobe thing is overdone...but this is still pretty darned slick.
SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES: Minato Will Leave Out All the Rest, by TsubasaArisato: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk-gn9MGwso
The music used is Leave Out All the Rest, by Linkin Park. This AMV has its moments where it just seems to coast along without doing anything noteworthy, but overall it works with its tone and the song's ideas and theme quite well, making it a solid music video in the end.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES: South Texas Deathride, by Aneinokaijin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDkwYHXGK8
The music used is South Texas Deathride, by The Union Underground. This AMV represents a combination of things that are...HIGHLY unlikely to elicit a positive response from me. First: Honestly, much as I love SMTP3, its FMVs are sparse and short, so it's tough to really make a worthwhile video out of them. Second: Grittier, harsher, and/or darker music styles don't often impress me all that much, and frankly, they usually don't make for good material for an AMV, because their louder/darker nature just kind of overwhelms everything and is often too constant; too much of one tone makes it hard to properly connect a video to a song in any concrete way. Third: The AMV uses a lot of visual effects, and while I think such things can be VERY beneficial, AMV creators, when they decide to really start mixing up the visuals, tend to go overboard with them to the point where it's distracting. Fourth: It's pretty short; only a little over a minute and a half long. AMVs that are this short tend to feel incomplete, often because they have to cut out of their song before it's done. But despite all these factors...this AMV really works. The scenes' actions nigh perfectly mesh with the music's tone and, at times, lyrics, the mood of the song works well with the mood of much of Persona 3's scenes, the many visual effects are employed with what I might almost call grace--they're numerous, but they're pretty much always effective at heightening the video's draw and the connection between scene and music, and never distracting. It's dark but not over-bearing, its brevity doesn't seem forced, and everything meshes into a single product exceptionally. Damned good work here; if they'd been able to keep up the quality for the length of the entire song, I probably would have kept this one for a rant all its own.
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU
The World Ends with You: The World Ends Without You, by Sunrise Studios: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=169670
Youtube upload found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-CuseDKRo
The music used is Pressure, by Paramore. Good effects, the scenes and effects have a good connection to the music's lyrics and changes...another basically solid, well-made video on this list.
XENOGEARS
Xenogears: AERIALS, by Lulu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To7z6C50Ics
The music used is Aerials, by System of a Down. This AMV has nigh-perfect synchronization between visual and audio, the effects are great...there are a few scenes that kind of just seem like filler more than anything (unsurprising, given how little FMV Xenogears really has to work with), but all in all, this AMV is great; it makes Xenogears look so cool that I almost forget when watching what a godawful mess the game actually was.
* I THINK they're fades and overlays...I believe I've mentioned before that my technical knowledge of cinematography is lacking, yes?
And as always, if you like any of these, please, vote them up or, better still, leave a comment saying what you thought of them. Quite a few of these seem to be almost completely ignored, and it really is a damn shame for someone to take the time and spend the effort to make a good product in a sea of lousy ones and then have it passed over.
FALLOUT
Fallout: New Vegas: Citizen Soldier, by Joylock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRX4AtqNMRQ
The music used is Citizen Soldier, by 3 Doors Down. Really, I don't know what to say about this. Joylock's Fallout 3 AMVs have made it into this rant blog twice before, once as part of one of these General RPG AMV rants and once as being so great as to deserve an individual rant. If you've seen them before, this is just more of the same--Joylock manipulates the Fallout game's engine to set certain scenes using certain characters, and basically creates a series of clips that not only connect strongly to the music that's playing in terms of lyrics and tone, but also shows the fundamental conflicts between good and evil contained within Fallout: New Vegas through the actions of the characters he manipulates, in a sense paraphrasing the game yet also exemplifying it. Great stuff, to be sure.
FINAL FANTASY
Final Fantasy 8: My Heart Will Go On, by T0mb0ner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvd8nfYedT4&feature=channel_video_title
The music used is...is...it's...it's My Heart Will Go On, by Celine Dion, okay? Yes. YES. I know. Look. Just...just watch the AMV, okay? As long as you can hold back the thick, hot bile that creeps up your throat at the thought of Squall and Rinoa, and as long as you can keep yourself from giggling at how unbelievably over-the-top this song's sappiness is...and I'm not saying that's easy...you can actually recognize that this AMV is honestly pretty good. The video works with the song and makes sense with the mood and lyrics, the effects are good, it all just works. God, I can't believe I actually like an AMV to this song. A Final Fantasy 8 AMV, no less! About Squall and Rinoa! Some dark magics must be at work here.
Final Fantasy 10: Burning in the Skies, by Junpei19870: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvJkJpRUipM
The music used is A Thousand Suns: The Full Experience, by Linkin Park. This video's good overall, and I particularly like the way it cuts to and from the Sending ceremony and the tragedy that led to it. Shows that Junpei19870 had ideas and some creativity in conveying them. The mood of the song works with the video very well overall, and there's some good moments of connection between the video and the lyrics, too. Overall, a nicely solemn and touching AMV that combines well the solemn and touching nature of both the song and a large portion of Final Fantasy 10's plot and themes.
Final Fantasy 12: The Last Conquest, by Resk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDUHO1TyGvo
The music used is Preliator, by Globus. Resk has had one of his AMVs featured here before, the Shadow Hearts: As the Warlock Said one, and gives another quality video with this offering. Resk's use of FF12 clips in conjunction with the epic, call-to-war music is so skillful, inspiring, and gripping that you can actually pretty easily forget how terminally boring and directionless the game actually was. Hell, this AMV is what FF12 SHOULD have been like; I feel like Resk has far better captured the essence of Yasumi Matsuno's vision for FF12 far better than the game itself did.
THE LEGEND OF DRAGOON
The Legend of Dragoon: Strength of Sacrifice, by Resk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRGqxqMIOn8
The music used is Hour of Destiny, by Junichi Nakatsuru--I think. The credits aren't clear. Hey, another AMV by Resk. I like that there are a few AMV-makers out there that don't just stop with one really good AMV, but manage to keep making them. The instrumental song is complimented very well by the LoD visuals, with Resk's editing present as scenes and events are matched to the tune's pitch and tone, and with a great many fades and overlays* and such effects to make it that much more visually appealing. A very nice work, indeed.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Real World, by SpeedDemon070: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwYeuUscBnE
The music used is Real World, by All-American Rejects. This AMV is just very well constructed, coordinating the scenes and effects to the music's lyrics and especially tone and shifts. There's really not much to say; it's just a very solid AMV.
MASS EFFECT
Mass Effect 1 + 2: Alive, by Vendo233: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aZfHgrPO9g
The music used is New Beginnings Remix, by Future World Music. Mass Effect gets more tribute videos like this than it does normal AMVs, but sometimes they're really very good. Most of these good ones are, of course, done by Geno|3oost, whose channel I directed you to last time. But Vendo233 does very nicely here, combining powerful, significant background music with appropriate visuals and the ever noteworthy dialogue of the games to create a tribute AMV that is pretty darn inspiring.
MY LITTLE PONY
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Ponysona 4, by MrSirPGW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jvam3L34FEo
The music used is Pursuing My True Self, from the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 soundtrack. Alright, I know I often pretend to know what words are going through my readers' heads, and I'm probably often wrong, but I'd bet good money that right now you are thinking to yourself something along the lines of, "That idiot, My Little Pony is not an RPG." And hey, no argument here. BUT! This AMV DOES still count as an RPG AMV, because even if the visual aspect of the video primarily uses footage from the MLP: Friendship is Magic cartoon, which, yes, again, I DO watch and think is pretty awesome, and I encourage you to watch it if you don't already because it will genuinely just make you happier...the overall premise is more strongly tied to an RPG (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4) than many other AMVs I've listed here are to their respective games. See, this is basically an AMV that takes the opening to SMTP4, from its visual style and backdrops to its music, and puts in the main (mane) characters from the My Little Pony cartoon. It's extremely faithful to the original opening video to the Persona 4 game, basically having the new characters do the same stuff in the same way as the original video made the Persona 4 characters. For example, the original opening takes off with the main character Souji spinning to face the watcher with various words and sentences of significance from the game in the background, while this one has the primary (pri-mare-y) character of MLP, Twilight Sparkle, do the same thing, using text from the show's opening (and a plea for Persona 4 fans not to kill the author) in the background. It's like this from start to finish, a well-planned and executed AMV that matches up really well to be a fun homage to the original opening video from Persona 4. Here, here's the original SMTP4 opening, if you don't have it handy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEwKj6W14Jo&feature=fvst . Watch them back to back--see what I mean? Since the majority of this semi-AMV's content is undeniably based on the RPG and not the non-RPG cartoon, I consider this one fair game for this rant. And while it's not incredible or anything, this AMV is harmlessly amusing, and its combining of Pony with Persona is basically seamless. You can tell it's not a half-assed effort or anything like that; someone wanted to make an AMV that was fun for its concept and for the fact that it's faithfully paying homage to the original SMTP4 through careful imitation.
PARASITE EVE
Parasite Eve 1: Killers Within, by Auron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbisAM1nMbU
The music used is Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn), by Rob Zombie. What can I say on this one, really? If you want an AMV that uses a dark, heavy, creepy song and a dark, heavy, creepy game to make a dark, heavy, creepy AMV, you probably can't do any better than this one. Sure, it doesn't seem to have much of a point, and while most of the effects are really cool, the black strobe thing is overdone...but this is still pretty darned slick.
SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES: Minato Will Leave Out All the Rest, by TsubasaArisato: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk-gn9MGwso
The music used is Leave Out All the Rest, by Linkin Park. This AMV has its moments where it just seems to coast along without doing anything noteworthy, but overall it works with its tone and the song's ideas and theme quite well, making it a solid music video in the end.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES: South Texas Deathride, by Aneinokaijin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDkwYHXGK8
The music used is South Texas Deathride, by The Union Underground. This AMV represents a combination of things that are...HIGHLY unlikely to elicit a positive response from me. First: Honestly, much as I love SMTP3, its FMVs are sparse and short, so it's tough to really make a worthwhile video out of them. Second: Grittier, harsher, and/or darker music styles don't often impress me all that much, and frankly, they usually don't make for good material for an AMV, because their louder/darker nature just kind of overwhelms everything and is often too constant; too much of one tone makes it hard to properly connect a video to a song in any concrete way. Third: The AMV uses a lot of visual effects, and while I think such things can be VERY beneficial, AMV creators, when they decide to really start mixing up the visuals, tend to go overboard with them to the point where it's distracting. Fourth: It's pretty short; only a little over a minute and a half long. AMVs that are this short tend to feel incomplete, often because they have to cut out of their song before it's done. But despite all these factors...this AMV really works. The scenes' actions nigh perfectly mesh with the music's tone and, at times, lyrics, the mood of the song works well with the mood of much of Persona 3's scenes, the many visual effects are employed with what I might almost call grace--they're numerous, but they're pretty much always effective at heightening the video's draw and the connection between scene and music, and never distracting. It's dark but not over-bearing, its brevity doesn't seem forced, and everything meshes into a single product exceptionally. Damned good work here; if they'd been able to keep up the quality for the length of the entire song, I probably would have kept this one for a rant all its own.
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU
The World Ends with You: The World Ends Without You, by Sunrise Studios: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=169670
Youtube upload found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-CuseDKRo
The music used is Pressure, by Paramore. Good effects, the scenes and effects have a good connection to the music's lyrics and changes...another basically solid, well-made video on this list.
XENOGEARS
Xenogears: AERIALS, by Lulu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To7z6C50Ics
The music used is Aerials, by System of a Down. This AMV has nigh-perfect synchronization between visual and audio, the effects are great...there are a few scenes that kind of just seem like filler more than anything (unsurprising, given how little FMV Xenogears really has to work with), but all in all, this AMV is great; it makes Xenogears look so cool that I almost forget when watching what a godawful mess the game actually was.
* I THINK they're fades and overlays...I believe I've mentioned before that my technical knowledge of cinematography is lacking, yes?
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Dragon Quest 5's List
Things That I Believe Are More Exciting Than Playing Dragon Quest 5
Getting into a lengthy debate with a stuffed animal.
Watching C-SPAN on mute.
Singing to John Mayer.
Filling out medical forms.
Plain toast.
Folding laundry.
Dragon Ball Z.
Pocket Lint.
Watching Girl in the Golden Boots--WITHOUT the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary.
Slightly moist cardboard.
Sweeping the floor.
Lullabies.
Playing Monopoly by yourself.
Hanging out with a slug.
The Family Circus.
Being a judge for a yawning contest.
Water-flavored soup.
A 72-hour Brady Bunch marathon.
An aerobics class led by a sloth.
Waiting in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Closely comparing toothbrushes at a store to determine which is the truly superior model.
Ricky Gervais...just barely, though.
Walking your pet rock.
Reading through the Megatokyo archives.
Being dead.
Getting into a lengthy debate with a stuffed animal.
Watching C-SPAN on mute.
Singing to John Mayer.
Filling out medical forms.
Plain toast.
Folding laundry.
Dragon Ball Z.
Pocket Lint.
Watching Girl in the Golden Boots--WITHOUT the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary.
Slightly moist cardboard.
Sweeping the floor.
Lullabies.
Playing Monopoly by yourself.
Hanging out with a slug.
The Family Circus.
Being a judge for a yawning contest.
Water-flavored soup.
A 72-hour Brady Bunch marathon.
An aerobics class led by a sloth.
Waiting in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Closely comparing toothbrushes at a store to determine which is the truly superior model.
Ricky Gervais...just barely, though.
Walking your pet rock.
Reading through the Megatokyo archives.
Being dead.
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