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Jun 19th, 2012 at 23:58:55 - Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love (PS2) |
This is a very interesting game. And that was a very vague statement.
As I find happens often, I had no idea what to expect from this when I began. It's some obscure 2010 NA PS2 update of a 2005 Japanese game that's in a long line of Sakura Wars games and has an anime and the rest of a full on media franchise. I've never heard of any of it.
It's categorized as a strategy RPG/dating sim, but I'm not sure how I feel about either label. There's definitely some strategy RPG, but it's really simple, and there's the tiniest bit of 'dating,' but it's 99% following conversations that don't have to do with romance, and of the 1% that do have to do with romance, 99% of those are silly, sometimes questionably inappropriate, things a 12-year-old would say or do. I don't know what I'd call it. It's about the "New York Combat Revue," a theater troupe/New York defense force, and it's the main character's story of how he gets recruited by the organization, moves to New York, meets everyone, learns a lot about them all and friendship, helps with their problems, some of which involve surprisingly mature discussions of life and death, law and justice, self-acceptance, pity, etc., they put on plays that the people of the city love, and they fight evil that constantly tries to destroy the city. And like I said, 99% of the game is dialogue. It's a weird premise and a weird presentation and a weird game, but I liked it.
I have played games sort of like this. It reminded me of 3 games in particular: Disgaea because it plays out in chapters and has the same kind of chapter scenes and dialogue presentation, Shadow Hearts because it's anachronistic New York, and mostly the Persona series because there's this emphasis on forming relationships with characters in the game. I guess the difference is that in Sakura Wars all your relationships are with girls and there are tons of different branching bits of the story depending on who you win over or piss off, and in Persona you're supposed to form relationships with all kinds of different people who don't necessarily have connecting stories. I'll always remember the dying man on the bench in the park, the little girl on the playground who wanted to run away from home, the old Japanese guy in the bar who left his family...that game seriously had some cool stories. Anyway, so however weird Sakura Wars is, at least I had a little exposure to things kinda like it before.
The dialogue is pretty good. Most of the characters are interesting and I actually enjoyed playing (reading) this game. You just follow them around their daily life. And the game is set in New York City, and I actually feel like I learned something about the place. There's a bit of a free roaming aspect when the game lets you explore the city and check out what's happening in all the places you can go to. Harlem is one area, and otherwise you can go to Central Park and Wall St. and see the Statue of Liberty. Whoever wrote this game really loves New York. There's tons in there about how great America and New York are, which, as an American playing this Japanese game, was pretty amusing. One of the characters is a black lawyer from Harlem who is super litigious. There's a lot of talk about soul food and jazz and community and fat Americans and it's funny because, since I've never been to Harlem and don't know anything about it, I don't know what's a stereotype and what's not. Like do they really like soul food in Harlem? I dunno.
This is the New York of the 1920s, roaring and full of life. There are a lot of immigrants, and I remember one point the game making a pretty strong statement about immigrants and diversity with a racially-charged scene of a white guy yelling at a Japanese, and then of course realizing later that he's wrong and they're all New Yorkers. But it's not just 1920's New York. There's a Demon Lord that's trying to invade the city, and the good guys all fight in giant mech suits, so that's the setting.
Each character (the 5 girls) has an excellent story, except Rosita, the annoying child with twin pistols who is obsessed with food. Hers is lame because she's the token annoying character in every RPG ever. Her story got really sugary sweet about teamwork and blah blah that other characters expressed in better ways. Then Diana, who has some fatal disease, she was annoying at first because she never responds like you think she will. So in dialogue, every so often you'll get a choice for what to say. You can piss them off, agree, hit on them, any one of various responses, and all these responses affect how you get along with that person and how they act toward you and perform in battle. Right so most of the characters I could read, but Diana, like in my opinion as a human trying to talk to another human, was irrational and would lash out when I was sure I was saying something she'd respond positively to. "I'm hungry Shin, what should I eat?" "Chicken." "What?! I hate chicken and you're a terrible person!" "Okay..." There was a scene not far removed from that...because she really likes birds.
The stories all follow the girls through some personal transformation, like Diana decides she has free will after all because you spend that chapter rehabilitating an injured bird. Cherion, the lawyer, remembers why she became a lawyer in the first place, not to attack people, but to defend the innocent in Harlem. And so on. Some of the writing was very good, like Subaru's story in particular there's a running theme of Polaris, the North Star, that guides people, and she relates it to you, the leader. Then crossword puzzles become a thing in the game, and especially with Subaru. Also Gemini, when it comes time for her story, you think you know what's what, but then the game throws an awesome twist at you and you're like OF COURSE and it's really clever. Then on the other hand, sometimes the writing is really juvenile (see Rosita) and at times just sexually awkward. There's no sex in the game. As far as I got you can make a move to kiss someone, but most of the flirtatious/sexual stuff is so dumb. Like Gemini had an old sword master who trained her to rub her boobs when she felt stressed. Then in some conversation there you can misinterpret what she says so your character thinks that she wants you to rub her boobs. I tried of course and she gets upset and smacks you. That's pretty much the rule here. If there is any flirting and you try to do anything toward the girls, they get upset, even if they straight up hit on you, they still get mad if you reciprocate, which to me doesn't make any sense, and is annoying because I can't figure out the rules of interaction. I could see this being REALLY confusing for like adolescent boys with real-world girl troubles playing this game. And with Gemini again, her master leaves her this scroll before he dies saying that her butt is her best feature, and there's a little running joke about her butt through her story. But actually they turn that one into meaningful story because it turns out she has some secret mark on her butt, which is what her master meant...i think...because he apparently liked her breasts too. Lecher. Anyway, by the end, you basically get with one of them.
I chose Subaru, who is an interesting character because her gender is uncertain through most of the game. Everyone calls her she and you figure she's a girl, but she rejects gender! It's very cool to see this happening in a game. And like in real life, some of the other characters are so confused and driven crazy because they can't tell whether it's a boy or a girl. I remember my step-dad in Thailand being so obsessed over how to tell whether the girls were real girls or ladyboys. It really really bothered him that he couldn't tell. So it's funny to see it here. I figured I would try to woo Subaru then to push her story further. Now, she turns out to be a heterosexual female, which is fine but too bad considering she was so provocative at the beginning, and turned out to be normal and everyone was like yay, now we know and things can go on as usual, reinforcing the dominance of gender in relationships and in understanding one another.
So the way you choose dialogue was cool. There are simple selection menus. There are 'simon says' type joystick movements you make to cook or do other things. Then the coolest one was this intensity meter. So say you're saying something like "We should spare the enemy's life." You can say it more or less strongly by moving the joystick up or down to fill up this gauge, then pressing OK. So say you say it very strongly, it might mean you have a lot of conviction behind it, or you are incredibly forgiving. So then a couple of your characters might really like that and agree with you and some story bit will happen. Now imagine you say it really quietly, like you don't really mean it. Now maybe Cherion, the girl all about justice, might override you because you didn't say it strongly. She might assert herself and say "No, the enemy is responsible for his crimes!" and then a different story bit happens. It's really interesting because you don't know what the different intensities mean or will cause to happen in any given case! Like you just know that you're making some statement with more or less intensity, but you don't know exactly what that means! It's really freaking cool and makes each one of those types of decisions exciting.
Finally, I guess just to mention, there is fighting in the game, and it's very straightforward SRPG stuff, no grids. Characters move and attack, everyone can heal, and everyone has a super move. Each character has X number of action points and it just ticks down depending on what actions you take. Each battle is basically a gang-up-and-kill-everything affair. There's not much thought involved and they're pretty easy until right at the end. The battle UI could use some real improvement. It's very tough to just check out an enemy's stats. The one neat thing about the battles is 'area move.' This means some battles take place over more than one area and you have to spend some move points to move to other areas to complete objectives. So say there are two areas and you need to destroy generators in one and defend a building in another. You can split your team up, have half move to the second area and you're basically fighting on two fronts. It's pretty neat. Also each boss battle has a flying portion. One later in the game I died on a couple times, then thought of a trick that made it ridiculously easy. You had three areas and had to defend an engine in one, another engine in another, and a steam valve in the middle. I tried to defend all three and was having trouble. Turns out you only need one engine to win. So I ended up just abandoning one engine from the beginning and practically doubling my strength in the other two locations and it was simple after that. Then the very last battle I couldn't bring myself to keep trying. In my opinion, the last boss (who you FINALLY fight the final battle after SIX previous battles...yes there are SEVEN parts to the final encounter, waaaay too long. It took me like 3 nights to do it) the last boss is super cheap. He attacks 2-3 three times in a row and just kills your characters when they can't do anything about it. So lame. I figure I've had my fun with the game. The dialogue was more entertaining than the fighting anyway, so I just turned it off and watched someone on YouTube beat it. Doesn't look like I missed anything.
So yes, overall pretty interesting game. Would probably never play another like it because though interesting, it's a lot of dialogue and it could get pretty tedious if it wasn't on the top of its game. But I'm glad I sat through this one. At least now when I see a 'dating sim' I won't automatically think it's stupid. Unless it's Leisure Suit Larry.
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Jun 16th, 2012 at 12:05:19 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (360) |
Beat this tonight, and quite surprised and smug now. I was oh-so-stuck on the first one, and you bet I got real scared when in Vegas 2 I revisited the very same theater stage where I was stuck in Vegas 1. I was so overcome with anxiety over becoming stuck again that I became stuck again...briefly, then I kicked its ass.
Vegas 2 is basically a carbon copy of Vegas 1, the only real difference being character customization for multiplayer and a plethora of achievement-related shinies. There are Xbox achievements, badges, medals, in-game achievements, experience points in 3 tiers (roughly long-range killing, short-range killing, and odds and ends like killing enemies with shields or killing enemies while hanging upside down from a rope) that unlock a bunch of weapons, camouflage, clothing and armor. This game is definitely built with multiplayer in mind, and I'll keep it around for that possibility. If I do take it online, I'll be the old grey-bearded black guy with the safari hat, mismatched camo, and poorly done face paint, and proud of it. If I get more achievements and unlock more things, I can dress even sillier.
So Vegas 2 is actually a prequel-synchronous event to Vegas 1, which I appreciate because I didn't pay much attention to Vegas 1's story. They keep referencing what your team from Vegas 1 is doing in this game, and I guess the terrorists are all connected somehow. Vegas 2 is just as intense as 1. Controls and levels play out exactly the same way. In the chapter I mentioned, you revisit -- or visit for the first time chronologically -- one casino from Vegas 1. Vegas 2 spends most of its time playing out in less interesting locales than slot machine exploding gambling dens, but it's all good.
Chapter 5 deserves a mention because here the game takes a brief detour from the squad maneuvering. You go solo in chapter 5 as you chase the bad guy to an airfield. This chapter really shook up the gameplay. It was hard as hell because you've got no teammates to rely on. I usually send my teammates out in front of me to soak gunfire before I clean up after them. In chapter 5, it's just you alone in an enemy-infested industrial refinery area. You must be very methodical, rooting out all the enemies, checking every corner, keeping crouched, always staying behind cover, using height to your advantage -- basically using most of the gameplay mechanics to maximum advantage -- in order to succeed. I died a lot, but each death was a learning experience. Ah, there's the order by which to kill enemies. Ah, I should enter this door and clean out level 1 before taking the stairs to level 2. Ah, there's an enemy hiding in this corner that has killed me a few times and I just spotted him so now I know for next time! It's that good kind of meaningful death that I don't get too often in games.
My last comment, the final battle. I didn't make it to the end in Vegas 1...actually, let's watch YouTube real quick...okay so Vegas 1 didn't really have a boss fight...but the one in Vegas 2 was nice. You have to hide from/fire at a helicopter to get it to radio for help. When it radios for help, your mission crew can use the radio signals to shoot a guided missile at it. Meanwhile, there are terrorists coming from two sides and lobbing grenades left and right. It was kinda hard, but I eventually got it, and there's a nice checkpoint halfway through before you actually kill the main bad guy. The chopper part had an odd glitch, and this happened a couple other times too. The fight takes place on and around a tennis court (bad guy hiding out in Costa Rican manor, of course he has a tennis court). You take cover behind some rock slabs. The chopper is ahead of you, enemies pour from a shed onto the tennis court left-of-center, and on the right side one lone enemy rappels down a wall at the beginning (shoot the first shed guy, then shoot the rappelling guy, shoot the next shed guy, then alternate chopper/shed guy until you have to move due to the chopper shooting missiles in your general direction). So the rappelling guy, if you shoot him on his way down but don't kill him, will get to the ground, then start climbing back up. He'll get a ways up, then come back down, then climb back up. Kinda funny to watch.
That wraps up my Rainbow Sixes. I have half a mind to go try to get unstuck and finish the first one, but I have a feeling I'm just asking for trouble. Because I was really stuck. Really really stuck. And there is supposedly the 'hard part' yet to come. On another general gaming note, I'm done with my frenzy that's been carrying on this summer. Need to focus on work. Will finish Sakura Wars next time I'm at P's place and finish Bastion after work over the course of the week, probably start something else after those, but then I'm gone to the US for a few weeks and pretty much on home stretch to prepare prepare prepare to have a draft of something written/job talk done by the time school starts in 2 months. Ah, work.
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Jun 15th, 2012 at 03:03:46 - Orcs Must Die! (PC) |
Bought this game partly due to recommendation from T and partly due to quirky and interesting take on tower defense. I'd played a couple levels for a Steam winter sale achievement back in January, and just fired it up proper the other day. Overall, I dunno, I'd give it a 3.5 of 5 or so, 7/10. It was enjoyable enough. I did like the silliness of it. Watching the orcs get shredded, spiked, chopped, lobbed into acid pits, etc. is endlessly amusing. The main character is a dimwitted apprentice and I found him quite funny at times. He talks a bit of story (which is pretty irrelevant except to drive home that he is an idiot) before/after each level, and later on some of his conversations with the bad guy are hilarious, particularly when she insults him and he says "oh, the old man (his master, before he died) used to tell me that!" Then she insults him again like "I will kill you and drink your blood!" and again he says his master used to tell him that...when he was drunk. Then she laments, "Oh if you only knew the pleasures we could have had." He says, "Hm, he never said that." I restarted the level to listen to it a couple times. With the presentation, trust me, it's funny.
The game wasn't as innovative as I'd thought it might be. Sure, it's tower defense from a third-person perspective. But I've played Sanctum (first-person but same idea). Sure, you unlock a new trap each level and you can upgrade them with skulls and choose your traps each level and purchase them with money...but I've played Plants vs. Zombies, which was way more interesting. Sure, you have to stop the orcish horde from getting to the rift, but that's tower defense. And sure, you have a weapon to shoot/swing and spells to cast, but that's every hack n slash game ever. All mashed together, this stuff is fun enough, but it doesn't have lasting appeal for me.
I found Orcs Must Die to be less strategic and more hectic. The game is a mouse-clicker. It'll wear your clicking finger down fast because you attack with your bow/polearm/spells as fast as you can click. Also, it is easy to be fairly single-minded about traps. I had a solid strategy that worked for 90% of the levels no problem, and I developed this strategy early on. Here are the Useful Traps: spike trap, ceiling crusher, springboard, archers. I'm pretty confident I can go back and beat the game with those alone. Then always keep on your wind belt, lightning ring, thunder ring, and use your bow. The springboard is probably my favorite. You just make a gauntlet of crushers and spike traps and fill any height position with archers...then do your best to put spring traps at the end and just launch the orcs back to the beginning of the gauntlet. I did so many levels without hardly firing my bow. Granted there is still a nightmare difficulty, but I've got no real motivation to try it. I had fun at the orc slaughter. Other traps I saw no use for. Like the swinging ball mace trap. It takes up the same # of squares and costs the same as 3 ceiling crushers, but the orcs have to walk through it as it's swinging. With the crushers, they just crush whoever walks under, period. Then there was a ballista...I don't even know what that does. Some air vents, don't see the point except to immobilize enemies a second. Why immobilize them when you could just kill them? So yea, some traps seemed overpowered, some seemed pointless.
There are also some annoying bugs. If you springboard enemies into lava, for example, there's a good chance that one will get stuck alive in the lava and it can be hard to find him and kill him to finish the level. It just sticks until you kill the orc who flew in the lava that should be dead anyway. I had a couple crashes to the desktop for no apparent reason. Sometimes you can't place traps on tiles that you should obviously be able to place traps on. Like for some unknown reason you just can't place over these 3 bricks and it ruins your symmetry. Archers also bugged out when I'd try to place them sometimes. They'd spawn in another location. The first time it happened I'd clicked like 5 times, then I found later this stack of 5 archers on the other side of the map. Weird.
Sooo, neat game, fun enough. My final word is don't bother with it unless you really like tower defense or you are really curious and want to play a quick pointless story with an amusing cast of characters, but there are way better tower defense games out there.
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Jun 9th, 2012 at 12:32:46 - Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Wii) |
Never played a Fire Emblem game before, but I am a big fan of SRPGs. It looked challenging and epic and all those good things I like. Start the game, lots of political intrigue story going on, don't really care, pretty bad dialogue, introduces tons of characters and factions and all this, very confusing to try and follow. Ok, so maybe not playing for the story. Guess how many times I died in the FIRST TUTORIAL BATTLE? I think it was 3. And in the first few levels after? Yeah probably another 12 times.
Fire Emblem is HARD.
Fire Emblem enforces a fun little rule called permadeath. Sometimes if one of your characters dies it's game over. Fair enough. Other times though, if it's not a main story character, it's just dead forever. Fooorrreeeevvvveeer. And your characters literally get one-shot. Not even your weakest characters either. The mid-level ones still get one-shot. You cannot just send characters out into the field. You've got to plan to a really unreasonable degree to keep vulnerable characters out of the line of fire. I mean think about it. You can go the entire game growing a character and then screw up one time and have it gone forever. That sucks. So in my play time, I started on Normal difficulty since I like strategy RPGs and I'm not bad at them. Ok so Normal is like my Nightmare. I finally decided to switch to Easy after I'd been doing this one battle a few times, and was finally almost done with it. I went to attack an enemy with a normal full-health character, and she got counterattacked, crit, one-shot, dead forever. I was just like omg seriously? Putting it on Easy! So I restart and it really was easier, but just the fact that there is permadeath is just so lame. I had this level 1 priest, my only healer, who can only level up by healing allies. She was level one forever because on Easy (most of) your characters turn out much stronger than enemies, so she wasn't seeing much healing action. Then in this one level, some reinforcements came (enemy reinforcements come A LOT, from every which direction) and killed her because they spawned right near her and she couldn't get away. Permadeath, bam. That's when I stopped for good. And as far as I got, you can't just create a new character (maybe can later, dunno). So my healer died there and I was out a healer. Each character, no matter how minor, is actually a part of the story. Like she had a name and was a 'childhood friend' of another ally I had. And she died! Anyway, Easy was way better than Normal. You get I think literally twice as much XP and some other perks too, like again, literally half as many enemies. But yeah, permadeath makes me insane because that's all you're thinking about is 'ok is there any way they can kill any of my characters this turn?' Not fun to worry about.
So let's talk enemies. The AI is really lame. First of all, they completely target weak characters, characters who can't attack/counter. Makes sense enough, but I mean, it's freakin brutal here because they die forever. For this certain logic, the AI routinely is stupid as hell. Many enemies will just stand in one place until you attack them. Some you can draw out by moving into their attack range and others you can't. You never know which ones will move and which ones won't. I mean I did figure out that enemies standing in doorways and in front of chests don't move, but others will or won't too. So you can't like 'pull' them reliably. And in a game where your characters permanently die, you need some reliability. Also, like I mentioned earlier, reinforcements come quite often. There are WAY too many enemies on the maps in this game. Those reinforcements are chargers. They come straight for you. It's easy to be overwhelmed. In the beginning of the game, they keep giving you characters of wildly polar levels. So I had my level 1 priest and my level 12 mage...and my level 1 thief could go around one-shotting enemies and taking more hits than the level 12 fighter...???? Doesn't make sense. So you can kind of abuse these stronger characters, but your weak characters don't level as much because you want to rely on the strong characters who won't die because if you use the weak characters and make one miscalculation, they die! And even using the strong characters a lot, you'll still get a million reinforcements and they'll eventually die too because you can't heal them because your healer is level 1 and she can't move near enemies or else she dies! AAAHH!
Mmm, despite all the things I hated, the combat system is pretty cool. Weapons have durability, which I've never seen in an SRPG before and I kind of liked. I also liked the inventory system and the trading and how you can choose which weapon to attack with on your turn. So a lot of my characters had 2 or 3 different weapons by the time I quit, like a weak sword for when I just need to knock a few HP off, a strong sword, and a magic sword that can attack over 2 squares instead of only 1 for range attacks. Characters in this game always counterattack if they're in range. So if a swordsman attacks another swordsman adjacent, there will be a counterattack. So you have to be smart. If a swordsman attacks an archer (who say can only attack 2 squares away, not an adjacent square) then the archer can't counterattack. So I'd soften up enemies with non-counter-attackable attacks and finish them off with what could have been counterattacked if the enemy didn't die. There was also a neat rock-paper-scissors system for weapons and magic. Sword beats axe, axe beats lance, lance beats sword kind of thing. Lots of skills to equip. Terrain and terrain effects. Seems like a cool battle system. But characters need some balancing and the game just needs to be less punishing and I'd probably eat it up. As it stands, I have had Disgaea 2 sitting in my stash for like 2 years, so I've got no time for inferior SRPGs!
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