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Nov 24th, 2012 at 02:33:29 - Lost Odyssey (360) |
Finished yesterday. Quite epic game. Best Final Fantasy game I've played in 10 years.
Everything wrapped up nicely, great story, some interesting revelations. The Thousand Years of Dreams are still my favorite thing. I'd like to find a collection of those stories elsewhere, or of that author's other stories. Unfortunately there's no way to roam around after you beat the game, and I stupidly overwrote my pre-final-boss save. Even if I find a collection, I still can't read them like in the game with the elegant presentation. Oh well! The internet has an answer I'm sure. But the way that the game handles character development and touches on these big existential themes through the Dreams is really freakin awesome. Now I am obsessed with thinking about the trials of living 1000 years, why it would be awesome, why it would be terrible, and what it would be like to watch 1000 years worth of people, nations, events, places, etc. go by. I'm glad every game isn't this heavy.
Another thing I really liked is that, like a lot of old-school RPGs, you get a ship (or 2) to travel around and explore. There are lots of secret places and a metric ton of things to do before beating the last boss. Basically when you start disc 4, it's like "Hey, here's your ship. The world is your oyster." And you can spend forever just doing what you like, leveling up, finding magic, completing side quests, getting ultimate weapons, fighting secret bosses, doing the secret dungeon, etc. etc. But this amount of extra stuff and the freedom to travel around finding it is just awesome. RPGs like this tend to be so much more structured than some of the old ones I remember so fondly.
The final boss battle sequence is very cool. The person you have to fight is really wicked, so it's nice to see him go down. The ending wraps up various character subplots, mostly to do with their relationships. Your party in Lost Odyssey is quite incestuous. They're all either related or in love with one another, except Tolten, who seems tacked on. The characters were all really good. The only one I was iffy about was Jansen, the womanizing jokester. He's the #1 source of comic relief, and it usually works. One area it doesn't is when it's mixed with his womanizing. For instance, he falls in love with Ming (which is the only relationship in the game that seems impossible - why would she like him?), and wants her the first time he sees her. They have to rescue her from Gongora early on. So he breaks into her room, casts a spell to knock her unconscious, and carries her off. His character makes this a really rape-y scene. But yeah, when he's not being a creeper, he's likeable. It does suck that Ming ends up falling in love with him. Queen Ming is an immortal and a queen. Jansen is...just some silly guy. I see no real reason for this besides the fact that he's a bit of a bumble and the player is supposed to be like 'aw, yay, she likes him too.' But to me, that just makes it seem like the nice guy gets what he wants if he pursues it. Again, creeper implications that I read into it.
That's pretty much it. I actually did a bunch of the side stuff, which is rare for me. But it was so fun and seemed reasonable that I just kept on doing more side things. I killed over half the special bosses, collected like 90/100 seeds, got several special magic spells, did the Kelokon tournament, went and found all the music boxes, found a bunch of the royal seals. I'm just so glad there was so much cool stuff to do! I really liked this game!
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Nov 19th, 2012 at 23:05:50 - Lost Odyssey (360) |
Lost Odyssey is a really fantastic RPG on the 360. It's a traditional turn-based one and feels very old school. I haven't played anything this "normal" in a long, long time. I'm about 20 hours in, on the second disc (of four). So far I'm just blown away by the whole presentation. The visuals are excellent with cool enemies and character designs. Actually this is my first real RPG on the 360, so I've never played one that looks this good. The music is also really good and reminds me of Final Fantasy music. I think several people who are famous for various Final Fantasy games worked on this one.
The story is good too. It's set in a world beginning a "magic-industrial revolution." They've found out how to tap magic energy and are harnessing it to progress technologically. Neat idea. You play as Kaim, an "immortal." He can never die, but he's recently lost his memory. You find more immortals (there are a handful) and they all have lost their memories too, but you find out that one of them named Gongora is bad, didn't lose his memory, and is behind all of the others losing theirs, as well as masterminding some political plot to cause wars and take over kingdoms and acquire all this magic power for reasons so far unknown. Gongora is sufficiently menacing, mostly because he's really manipulative, pretending to be in the service of this or that person, and then subtly destroying them. Basically there was an old royal monarchy, recently ousted in favor of democracy. I think that Gongora sees an opportunity to restore the old monarchy before democracy really takes hold, take power and treat the royal family as figureheads without any real power. So he recently had been brown-nosing the guy who would have been next in line for king, worked to restore some power to him, poisoned him, then kidnapped and enslaved his sister, the queen (she's an immortal) to use her as his pawn to restore the monarchy. Anyway, I rescued the queen and she's in my party now. Right now, I'm on my way to seek help from another country to stop Gongora's plans.
To get to this other country, I had to go through a cave, which was guarded by an evil sorceress. My favorite part of the game are the backstories and the whole treatment of memory. Throughout the game, Kaim is haunted by a memory of his daughter jumping off a cliff as he and his last wife (he had a lot over 1000 years) grab for her. Turns out the evil sorceress is his wife, tormented by her own memory of the event. There are lots of emotional and dramatic moments in the game. Some time before finding your wife, you find your daughter (apparently she survived the fall - actually Gongora had something to do with it), and meet your grandchildren, who are in your party. So at this meeting, when you rescue your wife, it is also your granchildren's first time meeting their grandmother. Very sweet.
There are these short stories collectively called "A Thousand Years of Dreams." Sometimes interacting with a character will trigger one, or setting foot in a particular spot or whatever. See even though Gongora wiped the immortals' memories, the memories are slowly coming back. So the Thousand Years of Dreams sequences are short stories presented sort of like a graphic novel, text against pretty backgrounds that change color and stuff. They are amazing to read. I found out that they were pinned by some famous Japanese novelist. No wonder. But they are memories of Kaim's past. Once I discovered a memory of another character. But it's just clips of him meeting various people, the impacts he had on others' lives, stories about journeying, about hope, about judging people, about truth and lies, about all kinds of topics. The stories are beautiful, especially accompanied by the music and backgrounds.
As far as combat and stuff goes, it's totally solid traditional gameplay. Your party can have 5 members, which is big. Right now I have 7 characters. They level up like in a strategy RPG. Instead of an ever-increasing XP number, each level requires 100, and the farther below the enemy level you are, the more XP you get for killing it. That makes it very easy to keep everyone relevant. The game uses front row/back row. So put high HP characters in the front, physically vulnerable casters in the back, duh. There's something called "Guard Condition" which means that your front row protects your back row - back row characters don't take as much damage. GC has a value, which is the sum total of all the front row characters' HP. As front row characters get damaged, GC decreases. As GC decreases, back row characters become less protected and take more damage. Also there are two types of characters, immortals and mortals, who learn skills differently. Mortals learn skills when they level up. Immortals learn skills by linking with mortals. So you can't just have a party of immortals, or else they'll never learn any skills, except from accessories. So far everyone has been keeping up learning like every skill.
I've been trying to figure out good party combinations. Basically there are 3 types of characters (so far). Melee, magic and combination. Characters are quite cookie-cutter and fit into one of these, and are nearly identical with other characters of the same type. This makes them easy to swap in and out, especially since keeping relevant levels is easy. But there's this tension between having a higher GC by putting more melee characters in, or having a complete powerhouse with more magic users but being more vulnerable to attacks. Tough choices. The only other sort of different thing is the ring combat system. When you do a regular melee attack, this circle pops up on the screen and it gets smaller and smaller, and you're supposed to hold the right trigger and release it when it fits right on top of another circle. It's just a little timing incentive to do and do more damage if you get it perfect. Like a poor man's Shadow Hearts.
That's all for now.
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Nov 14th, 2012 at 08:29:24 - L.A. Noire (PC) |
I *really* loved this game. Seems it's quite polarizing. People either love it or hate it. I can understand why people didn't enjoy it - the 'old timey' feel of driving, the slow-paced crime scene investigations, the initially confusing WWII flashbacks, the open-but-not-really-open city of LA, the I-thought-this-would-be-like-GTA, etc. I actually liked all these aspects, and the WWII flashbacks start to make sense as the story unfolds. Some other reasons I liked the game:
(1) Episodic format - I usually played 1-2 hour sessions. Each case is roughly an hour long, so the game is very easy to pick up, play a case, and put down. Actually in the beginning this was much easier when the cases didn't seem to be linked by any overall narrative. But as the overarching narrative comes together, it was a little harder to just play one at a time. Still, this format I think is brilliant. It's almost like a TV series. I recently played Alan Wake and it's presented similarly, in 6 episodes. Except I played that game in one sitting.
(2) Audio - The music in the game is fantastic. There aren't many pieces, but the ones present are very effective in conveying mood. I will be looking for a soundtrack. It's got lots of bluesy/jazz-y mid-century crime film type stuff. An odd classification, but it fits. The voice acting matches the facial animations in excellence. This part today floored me when Cole is screaming at Roy to leave the crime scene alone. That voice actor was really into it. The quality of these facial animations is mind-blowing enough. Adding great voice moves the characters past the uncanny valley. They didn't seem very strange to me. They appeared very human. The crime scene piano alerts were also awesome. Basically when you're in a crime scene, the 'crime scene investigation' music plays. If you exit the bounds of the crime scene, it stops, so you know where to be looking around. When you come near a clue, this little string of piano notes plays. That's your cue to stop and look around there. Very effective.
(3) Realism - Some of these crimes are sick. When you're on the homicide desk (you begin in traffic, then homicide, vice, and arson), which is where the game's events first begin to tie together, the cases are a string of brutal perverse female murders. There are nude corpses abused every which way, quite disturbing. Whenever there is a dead body, which is most of the cases, you have to examine it. Cole squats over it and you have to like move the head side to side, pick up each arm, examine wounds. It can be intense. And remember how good the facial animations are. These people look like corpses. The historicity is neat too. It's post-war LA. There's racism and sexism. I went in one woman's apartment and there were books about racial mixing, DW Griffiths movie posters, and other stuff. My vice squad partner hit the crap out of a woman in the face then screamed at a black guy for touching him and daring to tell him what to do. My homicide partner also consistently made misogynistic remarks. One time we were at a murder scene and the female victim had a black eye. Her apartment was a mess, so he scoffs and says that she probably deserved her black eye because she didn't clean the apartment. Yikes. So the race stuff wasn't that bad, but I wonder if they overdid the mistreatment of women. I don't know how "real" that actually was, or how common those attitudes were, or how extreme they were. It definitely stood out as something worth commenting on though.
On the other hand, there were little graphical mishaps that undermined the realism and were quite amusing. Sometimes Cole would get stuck in a corner, which was more annoying than funny. The funny bits usually had to do with cars. Like I mentioned before, if you hold down E, your partner will drive for you to your destination (an amazing feature), and if there's any dialogue, it will play that while he drives and before it fast-travels you. But since I'm not driving, I just listen and watch the road (oddly, I pay less attention to the road when driving [in the game, not in real life!]) and it's hilarious how terrible at driving the other cars are. They regularly slam their brakes right in front of us. My partners all tail-gated terribly and almost rear-ended other cars. They'd swerve. Other cars would swerve and cross the median. Amusing. The best car time ever though was when I was driving up to a house to question a murdered woman's husband. Very serious. I drove up onto his lawn and all of a sudden, for no reason whatsoever, the car does this crazy hydroplane spin through across the lawn and I slam into a telephone pole. My partner, exasperated, yells at me: "PHELPS!" Then I park and we get out. It's just very funny the juxtaposition of serious crime investigations and spontaneous hydroplaning cars.
(4) Skippable action sequences - Like holding E to skip driving, you can also skip action sequences! If you fail a few times, it will ask "Do you want to skip this action sequence?" These can be chase scenes, fist fights, stuff like that. I loved this option because more than once the fist fighting bugged out and I couldn't throw punches for some reason. Lose, lose, lose...Skip? Yes please. No problem!
(5) Layered story - I think the story in this game was b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t. There are several layers presented on top of one another. First, each individual case is a standalone story with its own characters and whatnot. Second and third, these cases are linked together by Cole's narrative and by the Crime narrative. Cole's narrative involves him rising through the ranks of the LAPD, falling from grace, and eventually redeeming himself. Solving the cases is how he progresses along his career. Where the Cole narrative is the story of Cole, the man, the Crime narrative is the story of LA, the city, the larger social context in which the other cases end up being embedded, and with which Cole's narrative becomes entwined. This ties the crimes together. Fourth, there is the Marines narrative, which is presented primarily through WWII flashbacks in between cases. This is Cole and some of the other characters' pasts, and has shaped who they are and what they are doing in the present stories.
At first, these all seemed rather disjointed, and I was initially disappointed in the game because I didn't have much sense of coherence. But I was still more than plenty intrigued enough by Cole and the Crime narrative in isolation to keep going. As the game progresses, the stories begin to relate to one another and there are all these moments of illumination. Like, the homicide desk is when some of the crimes are first tied by a common thread. This is also when you get a sense that there's a dirty cop somewhere and that something larger is going on. In the vice desk, you really start to feel like something's not right at the LAPD. Someone is into some bad stuff. The Marine narrative starts to make sense and you start to realize that people in the present stories were in the same company in WWII and what their various relationships were and are. The Crime story is coming together. Oh man, and there's also a 5th narrative, which I'll call the Newspaper narrative. This tells the story of a psychiatrist and his patient. Their roles in the other stories become clearer as you find more newspapers. I suppose this one is optional since the player doesn't ever have to read a newspaper. But I can't imagine not having read them. So by the time you're into the arson desk, every mission is like OH MAN and that last desk, the last 1/4 of the game is just action action action. Every case is like the most important case of your life, you get to play another integral character, and everything is coming together. Cue dramatic final mission, ending I did not see coming and almost shed a tear at, and voila, roll credits.
So obviously the game did a lot right by me, but it was far from perfect:
(1) Useless items - When you're investigating, that nice piano run is marred by useless items. These are beer bottles, cigarette packages, pots and pans, and other junk that the game will play cue noises to 'throw you off.' But it doesn't throw me off. It just wastes my time. I see that is a cigarette package and I realize that all the cigarette packages up until now have been useless junk. However, since I'm working *arson* maybe a cigarette package might be useful. Nope? Sigh. Or, hey there are like 12 shotguns in this guy's house who is a murder suspect. I realize that, for some odd reason, guns cue the piano run but are almost always junk. Since this guy is wanted for murder, I will check the guns. All junk? Great. Wasting my time with these useless items! Remove them!
(2) Side quests/"open" world - More pointless things. If you drive around the city, you'll get radio alerts that there's a bank robbery or someone's been stabbed or whatever, and you can go and subdue the bad guy. I read there are 40 of these. I did 6? There's no story behind them, just random street crimes. Their only purpose is to give you experience toward your rank. The only purpose of rank is to unlock achievements/outfits and to get those interrogation points that you can use to eliminate an answer. Also pointless. The open world, too, is pointless. There's no reason to drive around except to look for collectibles. I found literally one collectible on accident the entire game. You don't need to go anywhere except where you're supposed to and there was no incentive for me to do so whatsoever. So yeah, there's a bit of an open world, but who cares? It's not GTA where I can go drive tanks and rob pedestrians. I'm a renowned LAPD detective. Maybe I can go help old people cross the street or rescue cats from trees.
(3) Interrogations - Okay, I both liked these and hated them. I generally liked them because it revealed story, and they were tense moments. I hated them because, like I said in the previous entry, oftentimes I just don't understand why I the response I chose was "incorrect." Most of the time I think it was correct, or one of 2 acceptable answers. This continued to occur throughout the game. Sometimes it was me misreading their facial expressions or their voices, sometimes it was me using the wrong evidence to accuse them, sometimes the "wrong" evidence I swear was legitimate, sometimes the options don't make any sense in context. Like, you ask a suspect a question, and he says he doesn't know, looks like he doesn't know, sounds like he doesn't know, and you've got no reason to think of why he wouldn't know. Like, "Ok Sir, are unicorns pink or purple?" "I don't know." What to choose? Truth, doubt or lie? Sometimes questions did make this little sense to me relative to what I should choose. If I have no idea, why wouldn't I just agree with him that he doesn't know? I don't know whether or not he knows. I just met the guy. He looks legit and says he doesn't know. If I doubt, then Cole will say something like "Come on! You better give me something or I'm going to lock you up for a long time!" Whoa, Cole, calm down, the man doesn't know what color the unicorns are, okay? Anyway, these could be very frustrating. And if you royally screw up, you can imprison the wrong suspect and your boss yells at you and I, the player, feel like a dumb failure who is frustrated at the system.
And that's about it. Oh one more thing is that I bought this with all the DLC. Each DLC case was pre-loaded in its desk, and the game just incorporates them naturally into the game. These all worked fine and I didn't even know I was playing DLC too until I recognized one of the names. That's how well-integrated they were. Except for one - Nicholson Electroplating. That one sucked. There's a really cool explosion in the beginning. If you have bought it already, just load it, watch the cool explosion, and then skip the rest. They stuck Nicholson Electroplating just before the final mission. Terrible terrible terrible spot to put it that really ruins the momentum of the final cases. And a crappy case to boot. I'm pissed it was there!
And that really is about it. I suppose the game isn't for everyone. Read about it, watch some reviews. If you think it might be your thing, definitely go for it. Highly recommend.
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Nov 11th, 2012 at 23:53:29 - Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction (360) |
Last one for this batch. I haven't played a Splinter Cell game in some time, but Sam Fisher is different than he used to be. He's faster, more Ezio with the ability to climb around on pipes and window ledges, assassinating people from various positions. He also feels a bit supernatural because of this new "marking" mechanic. So in this game, after you kill an opponent in melee, you can mark up to 4 enemies (depending on your gun). Then you push Y and Sam pops out and headshots all of them. It's really cool to do, and you use it very strategically, say, when you come upon a tough-looking room with 4 or 5 enemies. Well, find the one who is a bit isolated from the rest and melee kill him. Then mark the others, and bam, cleared room. But it feels a little impossible. Yeah, Sam is a badass agent, but really? He can pull off 4 headshots on elite super soldiers in a split second without being even shot at? Skepticism aside, the rest of it is more realistic.
There is a new cover system in Conviction. I admit to disliking it initially, but it grew on me. You hold LT to take cover. Then if you look at some other color, a contextual icon will appear showing that you can move there. So push A and Sam scurries to the next cover. It's cool, but far too constraining. For one, you can only move to the edge of cover. You can't automatically run to the center of a barrier, for example. Two, you can't move to cover unless the game says you can move to that cover. The cover must be very near. So I can't move to cover that is like 10 feet away or more. I have to get up and run there. I'm not sure why the range is so small. Third, a lot of the stuff you can take cover behind, you can't move to with the autocover button. I'm not sure why only certain cover objects were included. Fourth, if you just want to move around a corner, you can't really do it. You need to 'move to next cover' around the corner, which means looking from the right angle at the right spot at the wall 1 foot away and pushing A. So, this new cover system, it's cool when it's available. Otherwise, it's rather useless, and it would be easier just to have a more conventional cover system that incorporated the player choosing what counts as cover. Sam does crouch all the time, so he moves low. This is a plus at least.
The enemies are not particularly difficult, and they don't get much more difficult from beginning to end. Actually there are only a few different types. The game is really really short, so there's not much room for additional enemies. Basically the only thing I had to think about was 'helmet or not?' If no helmet, pistol headshot. If helmet, machine gun headshot. They'll try to flank a bit and throw the odd grenade. It's weird that they don't have more tools available to them. Meanwhile, I have sticky bombs, which you can use to scout an area with a camera, or to make noise to attract enemies, or to explode like a bomb. For my part, the noisemaker function never worked. No one was ever attracted to it and I don't know why. I also had remote mines, EMP grenades, frags, smoke and flashbang.
Sam gets his famous goggles, though improved to see through walls and detect enemies and interactable objects. These also felt a bit overpowered and superhuman to wear. Oh, hey, I can see through walls now. And I was warned, "the elite enemies will have these goggles too." Unfortunately for them, I am smarter than they are, and so even though they can see me, I kill them first. You can also mark enemies through walls with the goggles on, which made it pretty simple to keep track of where they were at all times. This worked like how I recall Far Cry working to tag enemies through binoculars. There were usually several ways around a level to take out or avoid enemies. This was fun and worked to the game's advantage for staying interesting. Often I'd die doing something one way a few times, then go try a different method to see what happened.
There is another cool thing Conviction introduced called 'last known position.' When enemies spot you, this silhouette of Sam remains in that position, your last known position in fact. You can move away and enemies will converge on where they last saw you. This allows you to flank them, slip past them, and just mess with them in general. For example, get spotted, drop a remote mine, run away and watch them gather there, detonate remote mine. One thing I spent a long time doing on an early level was hanging outside some windows, getting spotted, then sneaking up and pulling an enemy out the window, climbing somewhere else, getting spotted, pulling another enemy out the window, etc. Great fun.
Story is good, a bit less confusing than these conspiratorial Tom Clancy stories tend to be, which I appreciated. It's all about Sam's daughter and some lies and deception within Third Echelon. The game's presentation has some especially noteworthy innovations. Your objectives are shown in the environment. How to explain? Say you have to get to the White House. When the level begins, the words "Get to the White House" will be displayed on the side of a building or something. Then say you make it to the White House. You go inside, and directly ahead on the wall you see, "Rescue the Vice President." Then perhaps a little audio scene plays through your headset explaining about the VP and the situation within the White House. Bits of video, maybe what is happening to the VP or whatever, will flicker on the wall in front of you. Objectives can be on the sides of cars, anywhere. In fact you can push Select to display your current objective, and it just like plasters it onto whatever surface you're looking at. It's really neat. This isn't a HUD gimmick. It's more like an artistic touch on what's normally presented via menus. I would love to see this idea carried out in other games.
That's about it. Died a lot, yet not particularly difficult. Many deaths just due to me screwing around. However, any actual hard part was doable usually by going into a corner and shooting whoever ran around it. Felt kind of cheap, but hey. The only part I legitimately had trouble with was the end after I find the Vice President in the White House. A bunch of enemies burst through a couple sets of doors and it's just overwhelming. I tried hiding in a corner (too many enemies, got frag grenaded and flanked), tried tossing all manner of grenades (still too many enemies and they enter in waves), tried opening fire with giant machine gun (too many enemies come too fast, flanked), and finally with some luck I got them by a combination of remote mines, mad machine gun spraying, and trying to suppress one entrance.
In the end, solid enough game, not my favorite of all the Splinter Cells, also recently enjoyed the Rainbow Six: Vegas games more. Very, very short. And I didn't find anyone on Xbox Live, so I dunno how many people are playing.
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